Work Text:
Leon remembered Raccoon City for many things.
For the rain falling over a city that was dying in plain sight, while no one could do anything to save it, even though he tried with everything he had to stop a tragedy that had been doomed to spiral out of control from the moment it was planned.
But above all of that, he remembered you.
It didn’t make much sense, maybe. Not when that night had been made of death and monsters that seemed pulled straight out of some sick nightmare, monsters that had once been innocent people, victims of a fatal fate. It didn’t make sense either because he had barely been a rookie cop, full of dreams that were ripped away from him in a single night. Leon S. Kennedy had walked into Raccoon City believing he was about to start a life, and in just a matter of hours, that life had been buried beneath broken glass, dark hallways, and corpses rising from the floor.
And then he found you.
You were hiding in one of the back rooms of the police station, your back pressed against the wall, one hand clutching your side, your eyes wide with pure terror. There was blood on your shirt, on your fingers, along the trembling line of your jaw, but you weren’t infected. Leon knew it before you could say anything. He knew it from the way you were breathing, from the human, clean fear on your face, from the way you tried to move away from him when he came in with his gun raised.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he told you then, slowly lowering his weapon.
You didn’t believe him at first. How could you? That night, everything that moved was a threat.
Leon crouched down in front of you carefully, his face stained, his hair wet from the rain, his blue eyes filled with a sincere kind of concern, though not enough to make you stop shaking.
“Were you bitten?” You shook your head quickly.
“No. Someone pushed me against a window, and I-I cut myself.”
He swallowed, looked at the wound, and then looked back at you, unable to understand how you were still conscious after how deep the cuts were and how much blood you had lost. He bandaged you as best as he could — badly, probably — but even so, he did it with gentleness, murmuring for you to breathe, telling you that you were doing so well, that it was okay, that he was going to get you out of there.
And somehow, he did.
Life after Raccoon wasn’t easy for either of you. You carried your own nightmares: the memory of empty streets, the wound burning at your side, Leon’s hand holding you up when your legs almost gave out. He carried something darker.
Leon didn’t talk much about his childhood.
At first, you didn’t ask either. Over the years, you learned to recognize those wounds in the little things: in the way he tensed whenever someone raised their voice too much, in how uncomfortable he looked around any kind of affection he didn’t know how to return, in the way he punished himself for mistakes that hadn’t even been his. He had a complicated childhood, losing his parents to substance abuse.
And then you came along, stepping into his life like a ray of sunlight through a window that had been closed for years.
Not because you were perfect, but because, even after everything you had been through, there was still something warm inside you. You were beautiful in a way that left Leon breathless, yes; with the kind of beauty that made people look twice, the kind that seemed to light you up even on the days you didn’t realize it yourself.
For years, the two of you kept getting to know each other. At first through slightly awkward phone calls, nervous messages, and meetings that seemed casual even though neither of you truly felt them that way. You would meet for coffee, go on walks, talk about small things. Sometimes you laughed, and one thing led to another.
There wasn’t one exact moment when Leon realized he had fallen in love with you, but one of the biggest signs was when he started noticing that he thought of you when something went right, and also when everything went wrong. Or even the simple fact that he wanted to call you after a mission just to hear your voice.
And one night, after having dinner together, he walked you to your door. It was cold, and you had your hands hidden inside your sleeves, while Leon couldn’t stop looking at you, the nerves written all over his face.
“What?” you asked, with a shy smile.
He shook his head, but he smiled too. That small, embarrassed smile of his.
“Leon…” you said, giving him an even warmer smile.
“It’s just…” He ran a hand through his hair, nervous. Leon Kennedy, who had survived Raccoon City, who had faced things no human being should ever have to see, was standing in front of you like a boy who didn’t know what to do with his hands. “It’s just that I like you.”
You went still.
Leon let out a low, humorless laugh, looking down at the ground for a second before lifting his eyes back to yours.
“A lot. And I know everything is complicated, but I don’t want to keep pretending I only meet up with you because we have something in common, or because of Raccoon…” He stopped, swallowing hard. “I meet up with you because I’m dying to see you.”
You didn’t know who moved first. You only knew that, all of a sudden, you were kissing him.
It was a clumsy kiss at first, soft. Leon touched your face, and you moved closer, and then he let out a breath against your mouth that sounded like years of restraint finally collapsing on top of him.
After that, Leon asked you out in such a Leon way that it still made you smile whenever you remembered how beautiful it had been.
He showed up with a bouquet of peonies, your favorites, because once, months earlier, you had mentioned almost without thinking that you found them beautiful, that there was something delicate and full of life about them. And Leon had remembered.
He also had a simple ring with him, a delicate, pretty piece. He gave it to you with his ears slightly red and the most vulnerable look you had ever seen on him.
“I don’t know how to say this, but…” he told you. “I just… I want to do this right with you. I want you to know I’m serious.”
You looked at the flowers, then at the ring, then at him.
“C-can I be your boyfriend?”
Leon turned even redder. You laughed, and he smiled in that way he only did when you were the one making him feel safe.
“Of course, Leon,” you said, with a smile that showed all your teeth.
From then on, you became his anchor.
You were the person he came back to when everything fell apart, the one who reminded him that he was still human when his job tried to turn him into a killing machine, the one who touched his hand in the middle of the night when nightmares tore him out of sleep.
Your first time together was just as imperfect and beautiful as everything about the two of you.
Neither of you really knew what you were doing, not truly. There were nerves, soft laughter, hands trembling a little, and tenderness in every single gesture. Leon asked you several times if you were okay, if you wanted to stop, if this was alright, looking at you as if you were something sacred, as if he was terrified of hurting you even when you assured him that you trusted him.
Leon held you carefully, kissed you, and made you feel wanted in every possible way. And when it was over, he didn’t pull away from you as if it had only been desire. That night wasn’t perfect because either of you knew exactly what to do. It was perfect because you loved each other with an enormous kind of honesty.
And for a while, Leon allowed that happiness to exist. After so many years, he let someone into his life through things as simple as your clothes in his laundry basket, the scent your shampoo left in his shower, mornings when he woke up before you and stayed there watching you sleep, wondering what kind of twisted miracle had led someone like him to end up with someone like you.
Sometimes, he thought about marrying you.
He thought about a quiet house far away from the horrors that seemed to chase him no matter the country, a dog sleeping at the foot of the bed, finding you in the kitchen, kissing the back of your neck, listening to you complain about some everyday little thing as if life had never been cruel to either of you, he even thought about having children.
Before leaving for Spain, Leon had already bought the ring.
It was beautiful, with a diamond, tucked inside a velvet box inside a drawer that Leon opened and closed like an idiot every time he was alone.
He had planned to ask you when he came back.
Not before, because he didn’t want to leave you with a promise in your hand and the possibility that he might not be able to keep it. Leon knew far too well what it was like to wait for a phone call that could destroy your life, so he left without saying anything. He kissed your forehead, promised you he would come back, and took the ring with him.
But Spain was worse than he had expected.
The mission began with the search for Ashley Graham and ended up becoming a descent into another kind of hell. Leon moved through mud, blood, and screams in a language he only half understood, his gun always ready and his body running on instinct.
But his mind kept coming back to you.
It came back to you when he washed his hands in freezing water and saw that the blood wouldn’t fully come off. It came back to you when Ashley asked him, during a brief pause between horrors, if he had someone waiting for him back home. Leon didn’t answer at first. He only adjusted the magazine in his gun and looked into the darkness.
“Yeah,” he said at last, his voice quieter. “I do.”
Ashley didn’t push, but she smiled a little, as if that answer was enough to understand something important.
Leon thought about how much you loved it when he brought you peonies and you saw them in a vase in the kitchen first thing in the morning. He thought about the night you had fallen asleep on his couch, your cheek resting against his thigh and one of your hands holding his.
He thought of you when he almost died.
When pain tore through his body and the infection tried to turn his thoughts into something foreign, Leon clung to your name like a rope. Sometimes he repeated it inside his head. Your face appeared to him in the most absurd moments: between gunshots, between running, between being slammed against damp stone walls.
When he passed out before knowing he was going to be cured, you were the only thing in his head. He was angry at the thought of leaving you alone, angry that he hadn’t been strong enough to make it back to you. But when the pain grew so intense that he could barely even feel hatred anymore, he found himself satisfied by the fact that, even if his life had been condemned to tragedy, he had had you. He would die knowing what it meant to love and be loved by someone unconditionally.
Finally, when Leon was cured thanks to Luis’ work, he started to believe in fate, or in any kind of religious entity if one truly existed. Luis’ death had been a tragedy, but maybe it was also a sign that Leon had been given a second chance at life, a second chance to come back to you.
When it was all over, when Ashley was safe, Leon didn’t rest. His body was exhausted, covered in wounds, but he could only think about one thing, getting back to you.
He didn’t remember the drive clearly. He only remembered the steering wheel beneath his hands, the road stretching ahead of him at an almost reckless speed. But after spending days believing he might never see you again, every traffic light, every curve, every second away from you felt like an offense.
The ring was in his pocket, he had stared at it for a moment before he started driving, still carrying the marks of the mission on his skin and his heart beating violently against his ribs.
He had planned something better. In his mind, there had been flowers, probably peonies again, dinner, a speech. But Leon no longer believed in waiting for the perfect moment. The perfect moment was a lie life used to steal the things you wanted to say.
When he knocked on the door of your apartment, it was an impossible hour of the night.
You opened it with messy hair, your face still marked by sleep, fear breaking through your eyes the second you saw him. Because Leon was there, yes, alive, but he was also pale, exhausted, wounded, with such a broken expression on his face that your hand flew to your mouth.
“Leon…”
He didn’t say anything at first. He only stared at you, as if he needed to make sure you were real, as if everything he had endured in Spain had been for this exact point: you standing in the doorway, breathing in front of him, looking at him with tears in your eyes.
You took a step toward him, but before you could touch him, before you could hug him, before you could even ask where it hurt, Leon dropped to his knees in front of you.
“Leon!” Panic shot through you.
You crouched down immediately, thinking he was collapsing, that he was worse than he looked, but he lifted one hand, stopping you with trembling gentleness.
“No. No, I’m okay. I’m…” He swallowed, and his eyes filled with tears before he could pretend otherwise. “Fuck…”
Your breath caught when you saw him pull the small box from his pocket.
The world went still again, like the night you met, like the day he showed up with peonies and a simple ring, nervous and beautiful, asking you for a chance. Only now, Leon was looking at you like a man who had almost lost everything and had decided never to keep quiet again.
“I had a speech,” he said, his voice breaking. “I had it planned before I left. I was going to do it right. Take you to dinner, buy flowers…”
A tear slipped down your cheek.
Leon opened the box, and the diamond shone beneath the warm light of the hallway, so beautiful it almost looked unreal between his fingers, which were still covered in tiny cuts.
“But I almost didn’t come back,” he continued. “And all I could think about there, every time I thought I wasn’t going to make it out, was you. I could only think that I couldn’t die without seeing you again.”
You covered your mouth with one hand, trying to hold back a sob.
Leon took a deep breath, but everything about him was shaking: his voice, his hands, his shoulders. That man, the one who had survived Raccoon City, monsters, and wars no one would ever know about, was kneeling in front of you as if you were the only thing capable of destroying him.
“I’ve wanted a life with you for a long time,” he said. “And I’m scared to admit that, because every time I’ve wanted something real, life has found a way to rip it away from me. But you… you’ve been my home since before I even knew I needed one.”
Your face crumpled completely, he swallowed again.
“When I found you in Raccoon, you were hurt and terrified, and I still remember looking at you and thinking I had to get you out of there. I didn’t know why it mattered so much. I didn’t know anything about you. But there was something in you that was still alive in the middle of all of that. Something good. Something warm. And over the years…” He smiled faintly, his eyes bright. “Over the years, you became the best part of my life.”
Leon glanced down at the ring for a second, as if he needed to gather his courage.
“You’ve seen me at my worst. You’ve seen the parts of me I try to hide: the anger, the fear, the nightmares, everything I don’t know how to say without saying it wrong. And yet you love me. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to explain what that did to me.”
You were already crying, unable to stop yourself, so was he.
“I want to marry you,” he said, more firmly, even though his voice was still broken. “I want to wake up with you every day life allows me to. I want a dog that will probably hate me and love you more. I want to argue about stupid things. I want to make you coffee. I want to watch you grow old. I want…” His voice cracked. “I want a life. With you.”
Leon lifted the ring toward you.
“And if someday we can, and if we feel ready, I want children with you too. Not because I think that would fix anything. Not because I think love erases what happened to us. But because when I look at you, for the first time in my life, I think maybe something good could come from me. From us.”
You crouched down in front of him, unable to stay standing any longer.
Leon let out a trembling breath when your hands cupped his face.
“You don’t have to say yes right now,” he rushed to say, as if fear had caught up with him all at once. “I know it’s a lot, and I know I just showed up here in the middle of the night, looking like hell, and this isn’t fair to you. I just needed to say it. I needed you to know because I almost—”
You didn’t let him finish.
You kissed him.
It was a kiss salted by tears, clumsy from urgency. Leon made a small sound against your mouth, something relieved, and let you hold him as if he could finally set down the weight he had been carrying. When you pulled away, you rested your forehead against his.
“Yes,” you whispered.
Leon went still.
“Yes?”
You laughed through your tears.
“Yes, baby. I want to marry you.”
For a second, Leon didn’t react. He only looked at you as if he hadn’t understood, as if his exhausted mind couldn’t process that something this good was actually happening.
Leon slipped the ring onto your finger with trembling hands. It took him a moment, because he was crying, his vision blurred with tears, and because you were shaking too. But when the diamond settled on your finger, beautiful and bright, the two of you stared at it as if it were more than a piece of jewelry.
You hugged him then, tightly, careful not to hurt him, and Leon sank into you as if he had been waiting for that embrace since Spain, since Raccoon, maybe even long before that. He buried his face in your neck and breathed in deeply, once, twice, three times, as if he needed to convince himself that he had really made it back.
And for the first time in a long time, Leon believed that life gave second chances because you existed.