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The first time the phone rang, Chris didn't answer it. It took considerable effort to hoist his head up to look at the damn thing anyways, and the second he saw it’s an unknown number, he couldn’t be bothered to entertain whoever it may be. What could anyone not in his contacts list have to say that made it worth calling well past 1:00 AM to tell him?
Maybe he should have cared more—hell, considering the night’s events, that call could mean just about anything. However, even pretending to be concerned made the headache threatening the edges of his skull throb. He was just so tired, in a way that extended beyond physical exhaustion that comes post-op, after all the debriefing, decontamination, and decommissioning. It was a miracle he managed to drag himself into the shower before collapsing onto the mattress in the first clean set of night clothes he could get his hands on, making a mess of his drawers in the dark in a way that the Chris of tomorrow would surely curse him for, but even his bedside lamp’s soft glow felt piercing when all he wanted to do was sleep.
Now, he was on the cusp of finally being able to do that. Ready for the unknown caller to melt from the surface of his consciousness with the rest of the day’s mess. Distantly, he knew whatever sleep he found would hardly stay pleasant for long. Anyone in their field was trained in handling nightmares just as much as your everyday apocalyptic threat. Still, as his worn muscles faded into the hazy warmth of his bed, he hoped that maybe, his exhaustion would win out the fight and let him sleep in blissful silence. Just this once.
Then, the phone rang again.
This time, Chris couldn’t help but groan as he pushed himself up just enough to grab the offending hunk of glass and metal off his nightstand. Based on the familiar area code, he guessed it was the same number as before, and if they were calling twice, then they at least must believe it to be for something important.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Chris muttered to himself, before pressing the green button with a bit more force than is strictly necessary and holding the phone up to his ear. “Hello?”
“Hi, is this—” A faint sound of rustling against distant music. Were they at a bar? “Chris?”
His brow furrowed. “Depends, who’s asking?”
The voice isn’t one he recognized: a woman, a bit gruff, sounding tired, but steady. “This is Abigail from The Canary on 1st. Your buddy—” Another pause, followed by the abstract sound of a man’s slurred speech, too far away to make out. “Leon here has had a few too many, says his cell is dead, and he needs a ride home. We tried to haul a cab for him, but he insisted that you were his emergency contact and asked that we call you instead.”
Already, the name of the poor bartender eluded Chris, as all he could think about now is Leon. Of course this is about Leon. He should have known the moment a mysterious call came through at nearly 2:00 in the morning that of all the people he knew, Leon was the most likely to get into trouble at this time.
The scene they walked in on at that bar in Colorado replayed in Chris’s mind in near-excruciating detail. He knew Leon wasn’t doing well—it sounded just as obvious to this bartender on the phone as it did to everyone that knew the guy, especially Chris, who was well-acquainted with being lost and wasted in whatever bar would take him in feeble attempts to numb that perpetual ache. It didn’t work, of course, and he could tell that Leon already knew that, too.
Still, Leon had called on him. He could have stumbled out of that bar and into his next mistake, but he didn’t. He asked for Chris.
“Yeah.” Chris ran a heavy hand over his face. “Yeah, I can grab him. Just—let me—give me a few minutes, okay?”
“No worries. I’ll keep him company ‘til then. You know where we’re located?”
Distantly, Chris recalled driving past the place she named once or twice, but he wrote down the address she gave him to be safe. By the time he thanked her and hung up, he had already stood to throw on some jeans and a jacket, not bothering to change out of the old BSAA shirt he had gone to bed in. The lamp he flicked on still felt far too bright than it had any right to, but he braced himself against the sting in his eyes, seeing as he wasn’t going to be sleeping soon anyways.
He wanted to be annoyed. As he locked the door to his unit behind him, the cold breeze hit his face; he mourned just minutes earlier, when he had been tucked into his cocoon of blankets in a blissfully dark and quiet space. Another reminder that his work—their work—is never over, not really. Not when the monsters follow them home in all the places they can’t reach.
Chris should have been annoyed, and yet, he wasn’t.
Leon needs me, he thought as his Jeep roared to life. There was nothing else to it.
Even with the jukebox in the corner, the bar was eerily quiet when Chris pushed the door open. The warmth of the dim lighting glowed in sharp contrast to the cold cutting at his back. He spotted at most five other people there besides a bartender in her mid-30s at most, with purple highlights and a dark lip, and—
“My hero,” Leon said with a lazy flourish.
His tone was dull, with an unmistakable slur oozing from his tongue. Loose hairs stuck out around his face, somewhat greasy—likely from a combination of sweat and the oils and dirt on his hands, having run his fingers through his bangs over and over again. Even from the entrance, Chris could make out the slight redness of his eyes, sticky wet spots settled against the dark bags etched just beneath puffy irises.
Okay, yeah, now Chris was mad.
“Jesus,” he muttered, mostly to himself, before storming across creaky wooden floorboards to the bar. Before Leon could protest, Chris grabbed his bicep, yanking at the sleeve of his jacket.
Leon stumbled off the barstool and onto his feet, just barely managing not to collide into Chris’s chest in the process. “Hey! What the hell?”
Chris chose not to look at the scowl on his face, instead turning his attention to the unimpressed bartender watching them. Damn, he really should have paid attention when she said her name over the phone. Maybe it started with an A? Whatever it was, he was sure she would agree that it wasn’t worth dragging out this conversation longer than they had to.
With the hand not wrangling Leon, Chris managed to dig a $20 bill out of his wallet. “Here.” He slapped it onto the mahogany bartop. “Thanks for babysitting him. Sorry about all this.”
“Hardly my first rodeo.” The bartender shrugged. “Stay safe you two, alright?”
“No promises,” Leon just managed to slur before Chris pinched his arm hard. “Ow!”
The door swung shut behind them with a heavy thud as Chris dragged Leon out onto the street. Even if Leon had gone willingly, Chris wasn’t sure how much he trusted those shaky legs to carry him to the car without a helping hand.
“Didn’t know you liked it rough, Redfield,” Leon said, though the words lost their bite when he tripped on the curb, kept from the familiar taste of concrete only thanks to Chris catching him.
There was a lot Chris wanted to say. Things they should talk about. Why Leon’s idea of a vacation was drinking himself half to death alone in Colorado. What conclusion he had drawn closer to, just how far he was leaning over the edge of something final, something Chris couldn’t dig him out of. How each time Chris thought about it, he felt like he was falling, falling and falling and falling, the infinite darkness below more crushing than any abrupt landing could be. Like when a policeman knocked at his door the night his parents didn’t come home on time, or when he watched Piers’s figure get smaller and smaller through the warped glass of what felt suffocatingly more like a tomb as the distance between them grew.
Instead of saying any of the things that mattered, Chris spat, “Why am I your emergency contact?”
Leon shrugged. “Phone got smashed up sometime between Colorado and here.” Miraculously, he didn’t try to fight back when Chris opened the passenger door and went to help Leon in. “Didn’t realize ‘til after I left. Had your number written down in my wallet from when you gave it to me…sometime. I don’t know.”
Even if the redness in his cheeks was only from the booze, Leon bowed his head in a manner that, if Chris didn’t know any better, could be considered bashful.
It had been years since Chris had hastily torn out the page of a field notebook and scribbled his phone number down for Leon to take. Call if you need anything. Of course Chris meant what he wrote; he could never bring himself to regret offering Leon his help, even when it was inconvenient or frustrating, like now.
He just hadn’t expected Leon to keep that scrap of paper for so long. As if he thought it was worth holding onto.
In the light coming from just above the Jeep’s rearview mirror, Leon looked paler, and his brow was furrowed. With some luck, Chris could stave off the weighty conversation to come until they got back to his apartment. He’d bribe Leon into a shower and some food, and then they could Talk, as Claire would have put it, with a capital-‘T.’
By this point, Chris should have known that Leon never went down easy.
Out of the corner of his eye, Chris saw Leon white-knuckle the grab handle on the passenger’s side as the car jerked out of its parking spot and back onto the street. He made a displeased noise somewhere between a groan and a grumble, before pushing out the words, “Y’don’t even know where my hotel is.”
“We’re not going to your hotel.” Chris did his best to keep his eyes focused on the road and not the drooping mess of a man to his right, though it was proving to be difficult. “We’re going back to my place.”
“What, so you can babysit me?” Even in this drunken state, Chris could taste the venom dripping from the words. He could picture the way those hazy blue eyes were likely trying to sharpen themselves into a glare. “I’m a fucking adult, for fuck’s sake. I don’t—” A hiccup that sounded almost like it melded into a choking sound, but Leon pushed on before Chris had time to be concerned. “I’m not a sick puppy on the side of the road. Why bother wasting your time playing House for some washed-up agent as if you have nothing better to do? It’s infuriating.”
At a stoplight, Chris pulled a hand from the wheel to rub at the bridge of his nose. “And what if I don’t have anything better to do, huh?” The light turned green; Leon’s body lurched forward a bit more than was necessary when the car went back into motion. Chris pressed on, “Maybe making sure my friend doesn't turn up dead in a ditch is my top concern.”
Leon waved a dismissive hand. “Please. We both know it’s that infamous Redfield stubbornness holding you back from admitting that some problems are beyond solving. Some people are beyond saving.” He wore that familiar cocky disposition, but his tone was strained, enough that Chris risked a glance to see him squeezing his eyes shut. “If you want to help me, you’re about fifteen years late to the party.”
“You asked for me to come get you, remember?” The volume of his voice rose with each word. “I could have left your sorry ass back there to mope the rest of the night away, but I didn’t, because I care about you and I wanted to help. Friends care about each other; friends help each other. Simple as that. What else could I possibly do to get you to—”
A clumsy hand grasped his shoulder. “Stop the car.”
Chris scoffed. “What, so you can run off again?”
“I’m serious. Pull over.”
Chris stopped the car. Leon stumbled out before he could even put it into park.
There was a perfectly good trash can about ten feet from the Jeep, but it seemed Leon’s insides couldn’t be bothered. Chris clambered to get to the other side of the car the second he heard the retching. Forgot to even lock it. All at once, the fight drained out of him when he saw Leon knelt on the pavement, smaller than Chris had ever seen him before.
By now, Chris knew Leon well enough to wager that he likely had not eaten anything, which would leave only stomach acid and booze painting the sidewalk before them. For a moment, Chris only hovered, kneeling down besides the man, but never touching. Chris wanted to touch. He wanted to scoop Leon into his arms and keep him there forever, never letting the outside world lay a finger on a single pretty hair on his head. He wanted so much more than that.
Right now, though, he mainly wanted Leon to stop throwing up on the side of the road. Chris tested the waters, dusting his fingers across Leon’s bony shoulder blade on his good side. Leon didn’t move away. The hand moved down, then, to the center of Leon’s back—at first, nothing more than a steady presence, before Chris fell into the familiar rhythm of rubbing comforting circles.
“You’re okay,” he murmured, making an effort to keep his voice low and steady.
“Fuck you.”
Leon barely spat the words out before there was another wet sound of his sick hitting the concrete. He gagged again. Panted from the exertion of heaving up nothing. Chris’s hand that wasn’t rubbing his back moved to hold his hair away from his face. Leon’s forward was sticky with sweat. Tears ran loosely from his eyes; he might not have even noticed them. Even like this, threading his fingers through Leon’s bangs sent a bolt of electricity down Chris’s spine, but it morphed quickly into a sinking guilt. Shame, more like it.
Chris had wanted to touch that hair for a long time.
He realized, perhaps a second too late, that the heaving had dissolved into sobs that looked almost painful. The hand on Leon’s back moved to wrap around his waist, the other threading across his chest to pull him into an embrace. Chris could still feel him shaking.
“Chris,” Leon’s voice broke.
Somehow, without saying anything more than his name, Chris could tell exactly where Leon was going with this. “Leon.” It came out as a warning.
Leon gasped as another shudder shook his form. “Chris, I think I wanna die—”
“No.”
Too harsh, too desperate, too sharp around the edges. Chris felt more than he saw Leon flinch. Dammit, he thought. Dammit, dammit, dammit. He shifted so that he could hold the side of Leon’s head in his left hand, locking their gazes. Leon’s pale blue eyes lit up like stars beneath the streetlights. For a moment, Chris swore he looked younger, scared—like a rookie whose hands still shook when they held a gun, who still believed that he could do anything to save a city that was already dead.
It was that young man looking up at Chris with pleading eyes—pleading for what?—and whispered in the smallest voice, “Why not?”
Chris didn’t cry. He wasn’t going to cry, because he knew that if he acted too emotionally, it would make Leon more emotional, and they didn’t need that right now. Instead, he exhaled sharply through his nose and tightened his grip on Leon’s waist. Without thinking, his thumb swiped a stray bit of hair away from Leon’s temple.
“You don’t want to die, Leon,” he forced himself to say. “You want to get out. There are plenty of ways to escape this life that don’t involve you dying.”
Leon sank forward. His arms weakly wrapped around Chris, who moved his left arm to wind Leon’s shoulders. There was already a wet spot on his shirt where Leon’s face pressed into his shoulder, and he couldn’t give less of a shit.
“But it would be so easy.” Leon’s tears didn’t stop. If anything, he was crying harder now. “I would be so good at it. That’s what I’m trained for, isn’t it?”
At this point, Chris wasn’t sure where Leon’s tremble ended and his own began. “You’re not a weapon, Leon.”
“Bullshit.”
“Shut up and listen to me, will you? Just this once.”
A tense pause. Chris felt Leon nuzzle into the crook of his shoulder.
“You—” The words fractured before they could even leave his mouth. Chris tried again, “You think I’d drag myself out of bed after a grueling mission for just anyone? Even when you’re at your worst, even when we fight, I want to be around you.” Chris could feel his promise not to cry break as a wet trail of salt streamed down his cheek. “You’re so fucking special, Leon. God, I wish you could see yourself the way the rest of us see you.” The way I see you.
Leon sniffled, though perhaps it was meant to be disguised as a playful snort. “I bet you say that to all the boys,” he mumbled, mouth still somewhat obscured by the t-shirt his face had been buried in.
The deflection fell flat. Chris shook his head, feeling Leon’s hair brush against his cheek. Even he was caught off-guard by how sincere his tone became: “There’s no one else.”
He was quiet, but spoke clearly enough that he saw the slight movement of Leon’s hair with the breath of his voice. Leon shuddered again. Chris felt the fabric on his back bunch up in Leon’s fists, and took that as permission to hold him tighter.
Several moments passed like this. Once Chris felt Leon’s breathing start to level out again, he released some of the tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding onto. The cold pavement beneath them had begun to eat away at his knees, and Leon’s squirming betrayed his own discomfort. Hesitantly, Chris pulled back just enough to examine Leon’s face. Still sticky, and sweaty, and wet with tears and spit, but Leon nonetheless. What a miracle, Chris thought, to see him like this. To see him at all.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
Leon nodded slowly. “Okay. Yeah.” He swallowed hard. “Home.”
“I’m not a child, you know.” With some of the liquor expunged from his system, Leon had mustered up the energy to go back to being a pain in the ass. “What, do you want to come tuck me in, too? Read me a bedtime story?”
Chris rolled his eyes. “Shower, eat, bed.” He shoved the old sweatpants and worn concert t-shirt into Leon’s arms more incessantly this time. “I’ll take the couch, you sleep in my room.”
“I’m not kicking you out of your own bedroom. I’ve slept in much worse places than your beat-up couch, believe me.”
“And I call the shots in my own house, so tough luck, Kennedy.”
That at least earned him half a chuckle. While Leon showered, Chris managed to track down some cans of tomato soup tucked into the back of a cupboard. This unit was distributed to him by the BSAA; he didn’t spend enough time in it to make it a “home,” per say, but he made a slight effort at least. Empty apartments always came across a bit too sterile for his liking.
There was a picture frame propped up on the kitchen windowsill: Claire’s birthday party several years prior. Chris with an arm around his sister, Leon making a face over her shoulder. He didn’t have many photographs of Leon. The bastard had a talent for slinking just out of a camera’s view. This was one of the better ones, even if most of his body was still tucked behind Claire.
By the time Leon padded out of the bathroom, the soup was done heating on the stove. His tousled wet hair paired with the oversized clothing reminded Chris of those golden retriever puppies Chris had saved on a mission ages ago, though he would sooner break his own arm than say that to Leon’s face. They ate in silence at the kitchen counter. Leon hardly ate five spoonfuls over the course of ten minutes. Still, something was better than nothing. When Leon grabbed his water glass and said he was going to bed, Chris didn’t stop him. Judging by the way Leon dragged his feet all the way to the bedroom, the exhaustion must have started to kick in.
After that, Chris went through the motions. Did the dishes. Verified there wasn’t any alcohol in the apartment that he had forgotten about. Locked away his weapons. Double-checked how many painkillers he had left. Made note of the number just in case he woke up to find it changed. Left two by Leon’s bedside with a granola bar and a topped-off glass of water.
Chris may have been feeling a bit antsy after the night’s events.
His fingers twitched around a smoke that wasn’t there. He kept a pack in his coat pocket, but he could only imagine the snarky look on Leon’s face if he caught Chris indulging in his own vice just after scolding Leon for his. It took several rounds of pacing around his living room, opening and closing the window as the room fluctuated between hot and cold. When he finally forced himself to lie down, his feet dangled over the arm of the hand-me-down couch that he knew by now wouldn’t fit him. Not that he wanted to make a habit of nights like this, but he made a mental note to go for the pull-out ones next time.
For a moment, when he tucked himself beneath the afghan that had been draped over the back, the apartment felt much too still. His gaze focused on the ceiling, making out shapes in the darkness when his mind scrambled to fill in the blanks.
“It would be so easy,” Leon had said. “I would be so good at it.”
Chris didn’t rest his eyes for a long time.
He must have fallen asleep at some point, because he awoke with a start to the warmth of someone’s breath against his cheek.
The teeth of some nightmare or another still grazed the edges of his mind. Claire rotting among the masses in Raccoon City; Jill staring at him dead-eyed with a gaping hole in her chest; Leon taking that step over the ledge, Chris watching helplessly as the streets of New York ran with his blood. He swore he could hear the cracking of bones by the time his eyes shot open.
Based on the faint traces of sunlight beginning to spread across the room, it must have been early. At first, he mourned what little sleep he had gotten, no matter how uncomfortable it had been. It was as he blinked his vision clear that his heart jumped.
Suddenly, he felt very, very awake.
Before him, Leon sat on the floor. His head rested on the arm of the couch, leaving mere inches between their faces. Leon’s eyes were unfocused, as if he was on the brink of falling asleep again, and yet, his pupils were dilated, his sleepy gaze locked on Chris as if there was nothing else in the room to look at.
“Leon?” Chris could barely manage a whisper, afraid that the slightest shift in the air might shatter the perfect picture in front of him.
Leon blinked several times, his brow furrowing slightly, as if just now realizing that Chris had woken up. He didn’t seem drunk anymore, thank God, his face only betraying a bone-deep fatigue that Chris was sure mirrored his expression. “Chris?”
Chris rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “What’re you doing up?” He craned his neck to try and get a look at the clock in the kitchen, but couldn’t quite make it out from where he was.
“Couldn’t sleep.” Leon gave a half-hearted shrug. His voice was low, rough in a way Chris rarely heard. “Y’know how it is.”
He did. “I do.”
Just as Chris prepared to accept the comfortable silence settling between them, Leon’s head lulled forward just enough for him to look up at Chris through his eyelashes. This is new, Chris thought. In the many colorful words he had used to describe Leon’s behavior throughout the years, “shy” was never among them, and yet…
“The bed is too big.” Leon spoke softly. “Guess I got lonely.”
Chris became uncomfortably aware of his heart battering against his ribcage. He wanted so badly to do something incredibly stupid. There had to be a way out of this.
“I’m not the best bunkmate.” He gave a small smile. “I hog all the blankets.”
“That’s fine.” The sincerity in Leon’s tone took Chris aback. “You can have ‘em. You’ve already given me so much.”
Was Chris wrong about the amount of alcohol still lingering in Leon’s system? Perhaps he was still dreaming? The latter was at least familiar enough to almost call it routine.
“Not taking the bait to make some witty comment?” He reached out to give Leon’s shoulder a slight nudge, but his hand lingered there as he continued, “Who are you and what have you done to Leon S. Kennedy?”
Leon’s smile was warm. For Chris, it only fueled the fire raging just beneath his skin.
“You do seem pretty worried about the guy, don’t you?” When Leon poked at Chris’s shoulder in return, he left his hand there as well, leaving their arms to rest against one another. Chris couldn’t focus on anything other than each acute point of contact, and Leon’s words, “You called him ‘special’ last night.”
Leon was right there. Leon was smiling at him. Leon was touching him. Chris was on the brink of destroying everything.
“I did,” Chris said. Swallowed back the lump in his throat. “Surprised you remember that.”
Leon hummed. He hesitated for a moment, then, “You mean it?”
“I do.”
For a moment, Chris swore Leon was about to break down sobbing. He had to stop himself from reaching out to wipe away tears that weren’t there. Leon’s eyes glistened like river water as he took a shaky inhale. Licked his lips. Looked down at where their arms met, then back up at Chris’s face. There was that look again, like he was pleading for something he couldn’t ask for, but he needed it bad. He looked so beautiful, it made Chris sick.
Whoever leaned in first didn’t matter. One moment, they were staring at each other. The next, the amber taste of Leon’s lips was overwhelming his senses. This kiss began soft—too soft—and apprehensive, tense with too many what if’s to name them all. Their jobs, their reputations, the fragile glass they danced on every second of every day when each move meant life or death for a world’s worth of people.
Chris played the part of the big brave soldier swooping in to save the day well, but he knew how much of a liability Leon Kennedy posed. Any crack in the armor Chris put out could be picked up on as a weak point, which is why any trace of fear killed, and fuck, did Leon scare him. He was scared of losing Leon at all: in the heat of a fight, succumbing to a manufactured virus, by his own hand. Selfishly, this included losing the friendship between them. Chris would rather have a living Leon who hated him than a dead one in any regard, of course, but when he tried to think of a world in which he did cross the line and it went poorly, where he would see Leon out in the world and know they would never speak to one another or touch each other again because Chris took it too far, the thought—
“Chris?” Now, Leon was the one who was beginning to sound scared. “You’re shaking.”
He was. Hadn’t even realized Leon had pulled away. Perhaps Chris had never been alone in the fear of losing this. Maybe, just maybe, by some miraculous chance, they were both fucking idiots.
Before Leon could move away, Chris cupped the back of his head in his palm and crashed their mouths together. This kiss left no room for uncertainty. It was devouring, teeth meeting in their attempts to get as close as possible. Leon whimpered, and Chris felt the vibration in his own throat, as deft fingers wove into the hairs at the nape of his neck. Always, always pushing closer. Chris tasted Leon’s saliva, and wondered if this is what he was supposed to taste at mass when they offered the blood of Christ. As if Heaven was always meant to taste like Leon.
Just before Leon pulled back, Chris could feel the tremble in his bottom lip, so it hardly took him by surprise when a cracked sob broke from Leon’s chest.
“Oh, baby,” Chris murmured. He kept one hand at the back of Leon’s head and used the other to tuck away a few loose hairs, tips already damp from getting caught in tear trails.
“Sorry,” Leon spoke so quietly, Chris moreso made out the faint tracings of the word against his own lips than actually heard it.
“For what?”
“For—” With his free hand, Leon gestured to nothing. “For being like this.”
Chris used the position of his hands to gently force their gazes to meet. “For being yourself?” Leon almost seemed to flinch at that, which only worsened the aching that Chris felt pulsing in his chest. “I want to be with you, Leon. Even when you cry. You’ve spent so much of your life hiding. You don’t have to hide from me.”
Leon squeezed his eyes shut, sending more stray tears running down his cheeks. Chris shifted to cradle his face, wiping away the ones he could reach with the pads of his thumbs.
“I know,” Leon whispered after a drawn-out pause. “You’re always so good to me.” He stifled a wet chuckle. “Didn’t they ever warn you about feeding strays, Redfield?”
Chris smiled, slow and warm, in a way he wasn’t sure he ever had before. “Not a stray if I bring them home, is it?”
“You don’t—”
“I do.”
For emphasis, Chris placed a brief kiss on Leon's forehead, then the tip of his nose, then his left cheek, his right, and then finally, his lips. By the time he got there, Leon had already slipped into quietly giggling with each one, so Chris kissed him two more times to draw out more of that beautiful noise.
“Let me take you out,” he continued. “You’ve seen so much of the evil this world has to offer. For once, let me show you the good in it.”
The smile that grew on Leon’s face was easy, lighter than Chris had seen him in ages. He brought his free hand up to place it over the one Chris had on his cheek. “You already have.”
Well, how could Chris not kiss him for that?
Later that morning, when Chris brought two plates of eggs and toast to his small dining room table, Leon stayed put where he was by the windowsill. The steam from the coffee in his hands traced the outline of his features against the rising sun.
With his hands now free of dishware, Chris approached, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Penny for your thoughts?”
Leon hummed, not meeting his gaze, instead continuing to look down at the street. Two girls no older than their early-20s were crossing the street at the edge of the block, holding hands and laughing so hard they kept stumbling into each other.
The words were heavy from his mouth: “What I said last night.”
For a moment, Chris waited, but when Leon provided no follow-up, he took matters into his own hands. “If you’re about to tell me that you were ‘just drunk’ and ‘didn’t mean it,’ I might actually punch you.”
Leon snickered, but the smirk on his face fell as soon as it arose. “No getting anything past you, is there, Captain?” He exhaled sharply, nostrils flaring, worrying his bottom lip. “It was stupid. They train me to kill, but not to die. Actually, they usually train you to do the opposite of that.”
“But you meant it.”
Only then did Leon turn his face towards Chris, blue eyes bright in the sunlight. Chris never wanted to lose sight of those eyes for the rest of his life. “I know it wouldn’t be worth the pain it’d cause everyone. Even if I don’t understand why you all care so damn much about me, you do. Knowing what the aftermath would look like, with all of the loss I’ve already witnessed…”
It was another feeling Chris knew all too well. He pulled Leon closer, leaving his grip loose so Leon could pull away if he wanted. Instead, Leon all but collapsed against him, and Chris subconsciously relaxed a fraction as Leon’s head rested against his shoulder.
“I’ll get out,” Leon said eventually. “Out of my own head, at least. I’ll try.”
“That’s all anyone’s asking you to do.” Chris buried his face into Leon’s hair. It was just as soft as it had been in his loneliest dreams. “It’s all any of us can do.”
“You ever considered leaving this biohazard nonsense behind and becoming a motivational speaker?”
Chris gave him a coy smile. “Well, if the Leon Kennedy finds me so inspirational, maybe I should.”
“Don’t push it, old man.” Leon playfully shoved at Chris’s opposite shoulder. “I never said I found you inspirational.”
“Fuck you.” But Chris was laughing when he said it, and then so was Leon. Distantly, he knew that their breakfast was growing cold mere feet away from them, but that was something he could live with—so long as Leon didn’t kill him for disrespecting his favorite meal, which he might.
“You love me.”
It came out so easily, Leon didn’t even seem to register the weight of his words right away. Then again, it really was that simple, wasn’t it?
His heart light in his chest and his face warm, Chris held Leon tighter. “I do.”