Chapter Text
Grace knows she fucked up. That she’s fucked up. There’s just nothing she can do about it. Nothing she wants to do about it either except curl up in her caged bed and go to sleep with Leon’s jacket around her.
She knows that’s how he’ll find her in the morning and pat himself for a job well done. Her dignity is smashed between her thighs and the gun he held there. Got the sad, stupid girl in his grip. And yes, he does. He does. She’s stupid, and she’s sad, and she has nothing to lose, except him. She can’t recall a life before Victor right now, and can’t imagine one beyond the glass walls of the DSO. Yes, he’s got her. Hook, line, sinker. She wonders if she could do anything to turn the tables around. She knows nothing about charming a man like Leon, knows nothing about seduction. But she has to try, doesn’t she?
His mouth on hers felt like a battlefield. Her first kiss. Shot in action two seconds in. Run over by a tank and then strung up in enemy lines to make a statement.
But if she spent two successful years as Victor’s favourite pet, Leon Kennedy can’t be much worse. She can make him like her. She knows she can. Victor liked her.
His infection has clawed itself so deep that when he touched her, she could feel his heart, the thump of it, and the slight hesitation before he had kissed her. He had started slow, he had tried to be nice, but something took over the second his tongue touched hers. Some strange churn of emotions that she couldn’t recognise. She could work with that, she thinks. Unravel him slowly. And so what if she burns herself in the process? So what? She doesn’t want this life anyway, and there’s nothing else for her.
This, at least, is something. He is something.
She sleeps fretfully, in ugly dreams and old hurts. She’s in Rhodes Hill, walking the halls that change at every corner. She turns from the courtyard to the east wing, to the west, to Victor’s office, to the isolation ward where she had spent some of the most painful times. She keeps walking until she’s in the Wrenwood hotel. Peeling wallpaper that pinches and prods her like little needle marks. The shape of her mother is on the floor, her blood on the carpet that catches fire like oil.
The curtains burn down into cinders that dance into plain white walls, washed red in blood and lights. Leon stands in front of her, his flesh torn to shreds, and the black necrotic spiderweb of the T-virus running up his face. He comes for her with single-minded purpose—a hellhound hunting prey. She doesn’t even get the chance to so much as think of running (not that she would ever run from him). His mouth crashes against her, harder than he had done in real life. All teeth this time. Bruising force, and she likes it. Fuck, she likes it. The fire of his kiss begins to burn her until it’s so painful she wakes up screaming.
The IV is the first thing Grace feels, and she screams even more, clawing, trying to pull it off of her. She’s back in the care centre, back with Victor. Did he find her? Or did she never leave?
Calloused hands hold her, push her own hands away from herself. Grace struggles, scratching, biting. She wants Leon. She wants him here, not Victor. Not again. Not those cold hands on her, not that line of IV that will tear her veins apart, not the knives.
She wants Leon’s gun, the warm muzzle of it against her, promising her release. An escape. She wants his hands on her, even if he wants to hurt her, she’ll take it. She’ll be good. But not Victor. Please, not Victor.
She hears her name. A pleasant voice, a lovely, gravelly one. A body rises and pushes her against the mattress, knee between her thighs and a grip so tight on her hands she’ll have bruises.
“Hey,” Leon says, face so close to her she could reach up and bite him. Burn him. “I got you. I’m right here.”
Her breath comes back to her in shaky gasps. Her senses return with a stutter. She blinks and sees herself with his eyes. Shaking and sweating under him. Pliant. Foolish.
“L-Leon?”
Is he real, she wonders. Was he ever real?
“You with me now?” He sounds tired. Like he’s not slept enough.
She nods.
He releases her, and returns back to the seat he was in before she woke up. On the floor, by her bedside. Grunts as he sits down as if his back hurts. He keeps one of her hands on his—the one that’s hooked to the cannula. Fingers tangled together.
“You got a fever,” he explains. “Shot to a hundred and three at night but we’ve stabilised it for now.”
Through him she observes his hand on hers, his thumb swiping lazily in soothing motions. Left to right, and again, and again. He’s wearing gloves. Always with the gloves. And—oh. The jacket. He’s taken back the jacket and he’s wearing it now, and she turns red with mortification. Why would he wear it? She’s—it’s not been washed since she got it and now it’s a little…rank. She’s been holding on to it so often that it’s marinated in her sweat and other things. And now Leon is wearing it. Around himself, wrapped up like a blanket. She looks down at herself through him and finds draped across her chest is something new. Dark brown leather, lined in soft cream fur.. It’s just as warm and it smells like him. She brings it to her face, doesn’t care that he watches the movement with keen eyes, and breathes in.
She knows for a fact he’s holding his breath.
Wishing she could see his face, she reaches out a hand for him. Her fingertips touch his stubble, the delicious scratch of it that she had felt much, much closer, that she had breathed in only a few hours ago. He flinches but doesn’t push her off. Lets her map the side of his face, down his neck. She hopes he’s feeling better today, after what happened last night. After what she did for him. Even if unknowingly. Now that half of the virus in his system is gone, she thinks he should be breathing better.
She wonders if the DSO has put two and two together yet. If Leon has. And what will they do with her now?
“You should go back to sleep,” he says, voice tight. She feels that unknown churn in his chest. Smiles to herself. “I’ll be right here.”
The comfort of his gun against her legs is still there with her, the promise of a painless, swift death, if she can convince him she deserves it. His callouses on her neck, the graze of his teeth against her lips. Mouth so hot and hungry even when he tries and fails to be gentle.
Oh, she thinks, yes. She can make him like her.
*
They don’t do anything with her immediately. Grace waits and waits while the fever ebbs and flows through her, sometimes a river, sometimes a stream. It feels like the first time, that first injection that took hold.
Victor was so happy. She hopes Leon is happy this time.
Sometimes she can feel his hand on hers, sometimes she can feel her mother, and sometimes she can feel the slice of a scalpel. She walks the halls of her life, and the lives she’s never had. Swims in confusing, impossible dreams, and unrealities that happened. She keeps coming back to the same room. All the hallways lead here. In the isolation room at the Chronic Care Centre. White walls, and plexiglass. It’s exactly like the Containment Hold at the DSO.
Grace is sitting on an armchair. Leather. Expensive. Handcuffs tying her to the armrests. A hand rests on her shoulder. She doesn’t need to look at it to know the man attached to it.
Victor places his mouth next to her ear, flickers his tongue with pleasure. A wash of rotten breath hits her but Grace is used to it. It’s the gentle nudge of his tongue against her neck that makes her whimper.
Before them is Alyssa Ashcroft’s desecrated corpse. It shambles around the room aimlessly.
“Go on, Miss Ashcroft,” Victor prods. “Ask your mother for a hug.”
She can feel the virus pumping itself in her mother’s dead veins, crawling up her nerves, blanketing her brain. If Grace wanted, she could wrap her fingers around it, prod the virus to move her mother, and embrace her before she rips her once upon a time daughter’s throat. If she wanted, Grace could ask Alyssa’s corpse to attack Victor.
She doesn’t do either. She gives the virus a caress, and asks it politely to leave. It’s not wanted here. It’s not wanted. Her mother died ten years ago, and this mimicry is just painful. Her chest burns with yearning as Alyssa’s infected body crumbles into the floor.
This isn’t how things went the first time, but it’s all she can do now. All she’ll do. Victor screams, screeches, scrapes his blackened fingernails down her cheek but Grace holds firm, prays for death.
When she wakes up, Leon isn’t there. Grace doesn’t know how long it’s been but her fever’s broken. She’s sticky with sweat under the heat of the jacket draped across her. Her bones hurt, her muscles feel raw, and the IV is blessedly gone from her skin.
Little dredges of sleep call to her, and with nothing to do, no one to see with, Grace goes back to her dreams.
The next time she wakes up it’s for the medical staff filing in. She hears boots with them, heavy, purposeful, and the click of guns, but no Leon. She really should have known something’s wrong but she’s so groggy, thinking is difficult and a faraway thing for her.
“She’s awake,” someone says. A voice she vaguely recognises. She thinks it’s the person who usually takes her blood.
“W-Where’s Leon?” she asks, but no one answers her.
“Listen,” the man continues. “I’m not so sure about this. You said the board gave you clearance?”
Grace tries sitting up, and two sets of firm hands push her down. The prick against her arm is so quick, she doesn’t register it almost before the fear grips her heart like a vice. Air leaves her, and a slow, sticky cloud shoots up her spine and dulls her brain instantly. She opens her mouth but nothing comes out.
A gun fires, close to her but muffled as the sedative takes over and the ringing in her ears is louder than anything else.
“That’s okay,” she hears a new voice. Nasal, grating. “This is all the help we need.”
Help, Grace thinks. She needs help too. Unsteady hands scrabble for the nearest thing to her. Cool metal, a long rod. She takes hold and swings, hits someone against the head. There’s a shattering of glass, a sharp slice against her bare feet but Grace doesn’t stop until the rod is yanked out of her feeble hands and something hard punches against her stomach. Her world is dulled, the pain comes to her in halves but she crumples into the ground anyway, dizzy and blind, unable to tell what is up and what is down.
“Hey!” The loud, nasal voice rings out. “Careful with her. That’s the only specimen we have.”
Grace reaches and bites the ankle closest to her. She expects the foot that comes slamming on her head but too slow to move out of the way. She spits blood, tries to pick herself up, slips, falls, and tries again.
“Enough!” the nasal man says as another kick lands her against the wall. “Pack her up quick before they alert the dog—”
The gunshot that interrupts them is loud. Too loud.
Grace knows the sound of the revolver. She opens her eyes, his eyes to see herself on the ground, bloody and bruised. Sorry and pathetic. The body of the man who had kicked her is crumpled next to her. Around her is shattered glass, scattered in a halo, cutting into her gloriously. The maiden sacrifice laid out on the stone. And her blood seems to have summoned a creature from the depths of hell.
Leon looks incensed. Or, well, he feels. She can’t see his face but she can see the redness of his vision. Feel the blood boil against his veins, the strange lump in his throat, the squeeze around his heart.
“Woof,” he says, mirthlessly, and fires again.
He shoots out the two other guards in the room before they can so much as turn towards him. One’s head explodes with a force so resounding, Grace feels it right through her body, the recoil burning up his arm, and all the way to her, so far away. The second guard goes down with even more ease, guts blown into the wall. His eyes keep looking forward, seeing nothing, the shock never even truly registering in his face.
“Having a party without me?” Leon says. “I’m offended.”
“Stand down, Agent Kennedy,” the nasal man hisses. He’s a doctor, a scientist, or something along those lines. A long, white lab coat, an important looking suit underneath. He looks younger than Leon, but there are streaks of white all over his otherwise dark hair. “This is above your clearance.”
Leon barks out a laugh. Bitter as bile. “My clearance is whatever the fuck I say it is.”
“That’s not—”
“And last I checked,” Leon continues, “no one’s allowed any tests on Elpis without my sign off.”
“That’s bullshit,” Dr. Nasal yells. “You’re just some stupid dog. You’re supposed to do what we tell you to! This is beyond your—”
Leon shoots out his kneecap. “Has anyone told you, you talk too much?”
He fires another round at a technician who tries to make a run for it. “Wouldn’t do that,” Leon advises. He waits a bit, watches the rogue med staff huddle towards the other corner of the room, away from Leon, away from Grace. He waits a little more for the doctor's howls to quiet down into whimpers.
“So,” Leon says eventually. “Who, here is gonna tell me what’s going on?”
*
He takes out the glass from her feet so carefully Grace barely feels it. Besides them sits Sherry Birkin, looking from Grace to Leon to Grace and back and forth, again and again like there’s some equation set in the distance between the two of them that she’s trying to solve.
“Shut up, Birkin,” Leon grinds out.
“I didn’t say anything.” Sherry’s voice is beautiful. Friendly. Grace liked it the first time she met her and then she didn’t see her for days again. It was disappointing but nothing too big that she would dwell on it long.
“I can hear you thinking,” Leon bites out, “and I don’t like it.”
Sherry just shrugs. She turns to Grace. “How are you feeling?”
“D-Dizzy,” Grace says. “Like—like I’m drunk.”
Sherry nods. “That will stay for a few more hours.”
From Sherry’s eyes, Grace looks small and tired. An injured little thing they found on the side of the road, and now they’re cleaning her up before she gets sepsis.
They’ve taken her to a different room. This one’s even more like a hospital ward than her glass cage was.
She’s seated on the bed, and Sherry on the recliner next to her. Leon is on a short stool, tweezers, cotton, gauze, and a steel tray next to him. Grace had protested so hard to anyone else touching her, Leon had to take over the job himself. She looks at Leon, his eyes fastidious on the work his hands are doing, pulling glass out of Grace, one shard at a time, thumb stroking the base of her heel in a rhythm he probably doesn’t even realise. His jacket is back on her shoulders, a shock blanket meant to hold her pieces together.
Leon is unkempt. Like he ran out of bed for this. For her. Rumpled shirt, messy hair. Two of the buttons are fastened wrong, and no gloves. Grace feels a thrill of seeing his obscene, naked fingers on her skin, touching her without a barrier, without a care. Holding the glass pieces with the tweezers and skin brushing against skin as he pulls them out.
There’s a smear of blood on his cheek, like a bruise, or the memory of a woman’s lipstick. Grace sways as she leans down and places her lips exactly there, wipes away the stain with her mouth, knowing full well that they have an audience.
“Thank you,” she says.
He’s looking at her lips. “Just doin’ my job.”
He finishes up the rest of the glass in silence, still just as gentle as before, if not more. When it’s over, he dabs all her cuts with a swab of cotton doused in antiseptic. He’s slow and methodical, like he dresses wounds for a living. Maybe Grace should request him to do all her tests in the future, just take over all her medical needs.
He even cleans up well after. Wraps her feet in bandages, and takes away all the used cotton and glass pieces along with the tray. He promises to come back in a few minutes. Says he has to check on something, and leaves without even a backward glance at her.
“That’s a dangerous game you’re trying to play,” Sherry tells her when Leon’s heavy footsteps are distinctly far enough.
Grace says nothing. There’s nothing she can say.
*
The first time Grace met Sherry, it made her sick to be too close to her. The infection oozed out, a toxic fume so thick it must have taken inhuman strength to stay upright and coherent the way she was.
Now the ooze is gone, the infection cut in half. She must have been close by when Grace bled her mind out the other day. Was it yesterday? She would ask Sherry how she’s feeling but that would be saying too much. She could also bury in a little closer and check it out herself, but something about the idea feels invasive for some reason. Grace doesn’t feel this way about Leon. With him, she wants to sink as close as she possibly can into him. She would burrow right inside his skin if she could.
She likes Sherry though. She seems nice. Kind. The good cop to Leon’s asshole. She’ll be hanging back outside Grace’s cage most of the days Leon is there and sometimes Grace gets to look at Leon, instead of through him. A sweet treat once a week. A lovely thing to look forward to.
Sometimes she likes to look through Leon’s eyes at Sherry, looking up towards her from outside her box. Concerned. For a person she doesn’t even know. Grace did not understand how that could be possible, but there she was, and to see that was a whole different treat. Someone out there would care if Grace died, she had realised. It was a horrific, melancholy thing to think. It sent a thrill through Grace. It sends one now as Sherry reaches up and rubs Grace’s back in circular, soothing motions.
Grace is too used to Leon’s touch, and this foreign hand, no matter how gentle, sends shivers down her back. She’s not used to kind hands on her. It doesn’t happen. She doesn’t know what to do with it.
“This won’t happen again, I promise you,” Sherry says, breaking the silence.
“It’s okay,” Grace says.
“No,” Sherry insists. “It’s not. We—we should have done a better job keeping you safe.”
There’s no such thing as safe, Grace thinks, but doesn’t say it.
There is still goodness in Sherry Birkin. Kindness. Empathy. All the key ingredients that should have been burned out of her years ago. The way they burned it out of Leon. She can feel the charred edges of it brush against her every time he tries his hand at being nice. The jacket, the ice-cream, the hand behind her head to stop her from hitting the wall while he held a gun to her.
“You tried,” Grace says. “At least you tried.”
*
Sherry stays with Grace in companionable silence for another twenty minutes before Leon comes back. His knuckles are bruised, bloodied at the edges. He takes one look at Sherry’s hand on her back and frowns.
“Hands off,” he taps Sherry’s arm none too gently. “You’re making her uncomfortable.”
Grace is too busy looking at Leon through Sherry’s eyes to know the expression on her but she looks at Leon for a good long while before she lets her arm drop and moves away from Grace.
“Is it done?” she asks.
Leon sighs. “Just a few hiccups, but the board eventually saw, uh, reason.”
He takes a seat next to Grace on the bed, leans against the headboard, puts his feet up, boots and all. Grace has to scootch to the side to make space for his large body.
“Take a seat, Sherr,” he says. “We’ll be here for a bit.”
Sherry shakes her head. “No, I—” She presses her fingers against the bridge of her nose, sighs. “You stay with Grace. I have to make a few calls.”
She turns to Grace, reaches out for a moment but thinks against it and drops her hand. She smiles instead, thinly. “I’ll see you in a bit.”
Grace waves at her, jumping to Leon’s eyes. He stays still, until Sherry’s gone, until the door click shut and her footsteps fade away. He waits just a few minutes more before he turns to her, pulls Grace by her arm, gently, yet firmly and arranges her between his legs.
She looks small through his eyes, on her knees, in her thin cotton clothes, his too big jacket on, and bruises blooming across her face. She didn’t even know she split her lip until she sees it now. His thumb goes to it, hovering, not touching, then to the rest of her, settling at her back, exactly where Sherry had been touching her.
“Still dizzy?” he asks. She nods, feeling even worse.
He looks through his pockets before pulling out a white plastic tube, rectangular, somewhat flat.
“This might make it a little worse,” he says, cautiously, “but it will take care of the pain.”
She wants to say she’s fine but there’s an acute, throbbing pain on the left side of her stomach, and the cuts from the glass are a steady stinging noise in the background. In any case, Leon doesn’t wait for her yes or no. He uncaps the pen-like thing with his teeth, takes the back of her head with one hand, and uses the other to stab her on the neck.
The contraption makes a soft hissing noise as it injects something into Grace, she gasps, half in shock, and half in pain, but it comes out almost like a moan under him. She gasps again when he pulls the injector out and she sways, a hot and cold liquid sensation running down her bloodstream. She almost topples back but Leon catches her in time and pulls her to himself. She finds an anchor against his shirt, scoots close to his chest, places her heavy head there.
“Easy,” he rumbles. She feels every vibration of his voice against her skin.
He gives her a little moment of silence, a small slice of peace. Just for a bit. Swimming in the scent of him, the warmth of his shirt, the cage of his arms, Grace finds her voice enough to ask, “What will h-happen to me n-now?”
She doesn’t mean after this tiny hiccup, this little incident that Leon rescued her from, but rather the knowledge that the DSO now has about what she can do.
“Depends,” Leon says. “You wanna stop lying to me?”
She hiccups. He says it so normally. Not like he’s mad at her or anything but her chest constricts anyway. She had kept up her ruse of uselessness so well with Victor, and then Leon walked in and broke her in just a week. She doesn't understand how. Doesn't understand this feeling, this need she has for him.
She hides her face in his shirt. Bunches the fabric in her fists, breathes in and out, in and out. “I did—didn’t,” she says. Swallows. “I wasn’t—It doesn’t always work,” she says quietly. Half-truths are always good. “It doesn’t always listen.”
He lets her words settle in for a moment. “Is that why you couldn’t get it all out of me?”
She nods, frantically. Please, she thinks. Please believe me. Please, please. Victor believed her. The movement makes her head swim dangerously.
“Can you get it out now?”
Her breath stutters. “I don’t know. I—I can t-try.” She lifts her head, looks up towards where his face should be, blinks her useless eyes. “I'll try. I-I just—I don’t want to be c-cut up again,” she begs. “Please.”
She realises he’s still been holding on to the back of her head when his fingers tighten. She can’t see the hardening of his mouth, only her own face, looking up at him pathetically, bruises already beginning to fade.
“Won’t let that happen,” he promises. Lies, she thinks. She has to make him like her enough to make it true.
“What then?” she asks.
He sighs. Doesn’t answer her immediately, possibly relishing in the suspense that’s making her heart hammer against his chest.
“Nothing, for now.” He pauses again, as if parsing through the information and pulling out only the files not marked classified. “Not until we understand a little bit more about what you can do.”
“Y-You saw what I can do.”
He makes a noise. An almost laugh. “What else?”
She shakes her head.
“What else, Grace?”
“I-I don’t—”
He pulls her head back by her hair. Yanks. It sends her whole head reeling, knocking against itself, her brain putty under the drugs in her veins. “Grace,” he says, and for once his tone is not nice. She's heard him like this with others. Not with her. Not this nasty.
“I-I-I can f-feel the infection,” she blurts. Whatever medicine he gave her has been mixing with the sedative she got jabbed with before and now everything about her feels loose. Especially her tongue. “And I can s-see. Through the infected.”
He stiffens. Mumbles something to himself that sounds like , “Fucking knew it.” She can’t see his smile. The predatory glint of his eyes, but she knows. She can feel it. The ugly dance of the infection, the sick feeling of pleasure.
“What else?” His other hand, the one that’s not pulling her hair, finds the small of her back, travels up slowly. Her shirt begins to rack up, and then oh calloused skin touches hers. His palm is large, and hot. So hot. Like he’s running a fever too. Callouses, nails, scratchy skin, and—
She stiffens.
Metal. Cold. A—a ring.
“What else?” he repeats, and his fingers dig in. The ring digs in. A plain metal band. On his ring finger. He’s losing patience. She can tell he is, but all she feels is the cold. She shivers, in pain, in shame, in gut-wrenching hurt.
“That’s it. I-I promise,” she sobs.
“Hmm,” he doesn’t sound kind. “What do you mean you can feel?”
She doesn’t want to answer. She wants to ask him about the ring, but she finds herself speaking anyway. “I-If, someone infected is nearby, I can, um, sort of feel what they are feeling? A-And see through their e-eyes. If-if they’re not decayed.”
He hums again. “What about me?”
“W-What about you?” Is he married? He must be. Why else would he be wearing a ring on his fucking ring finger?
“You can see what I see?”
She nods. She can’t see the ring.
“And you,” his hand travels upwards, up, up, until he hits the edge of her bra, near the swell of her breast, “can feel what I feel?”
Her mouth dries. She can feel his hand on her skin, yes, and if she blinks and lets him swallow her, she can feel her skin against his. “Y-Yes.”
She feels the fullness of his smile. The sharpness of his teeth. “Good,” he says, and brings his mouth down on hers.
*
She could drown in him. He makes her so, so stupid.
Her head is all over the place, brain matter spilling out of her ears into the bedsheets as he pushes her down, dips into her mouth, consumes her whole.
This time, he is gentle. He’s slow. Like they have all the time in the world, like he’s tasting, not devouring. His tongue feels electric, sends her nerves exploding, her blood catching fire. Grace had read her fair share of romance when she still had a life, when she was a person and not an experiment. She imagined what it would be like to be kissed. To be wanted and desired and touched. It would be sweet, it would be hot. But at the end of the day it’s just skin on skin, body parts on body parts, lips, teeth, and tongue. An exchange of saliva.
But this is madness. This is so much more. She does not understand why. Why he does this to her? Why does it feel like this?
Even in the delirious state of her she can feel the scratch of his ring and yet she opens her mouth for him, brushes her tongue against him tentatively, trying to kiss him back, move her mouth like he is. She arches up, holds tighter on to his shirt, makes sweet noises, feels herself through him—her skin, her wet mouth, her nails, her breath. The churning feeling is back against his chest, a little storm dancing around his heart. She hovers around it, feeling the undulating shape of it. She asks the virus to hold it between its teeth, and she squeezes.
He pulls back from her, breathing heavily, feeling the drugged churn of her mind seep into his.
He’s dizzy too, for half a second. Not long enough for him to notice. And then he’s in his own mind again.
“Make me stop,” he says.
“W-What?”
“I’m still infected. You can see through me, feel through me, yeah? You can make me stop.”
She shakes her head.
“I can’t. I-It doesn’t always work. Only s-sometimes.”
“Then, we practice.”
His hand turns from the back of her head to her throat, presses against it lightly, where he had pressed his gun into her not so long ago. If he presses just right, he could make her stop breathing. He could end this.
“Make me stop,” he says. He squeezes and she gasps, her body surging up but he holds her down well. Her hands fly up to wrap around his arm but all she does is hold. She doesn’t try to pry him off of herself. “Make me stop, Grace.”
She wants to die. It would be so easy. It would be so good.
His other hand slides down her back until it reaches the waistband of her pants where he hovers. “Make me stop,” he asks her again but she doesn’t want that. She’s sick to the core of her. Victor had cut out so much of her, he must have cut out her senses too.
She reaches out to the ugly rot in him, the parts of it that has zigzagged its way to his hand, the one he moves between her legs like a threat. She grips the infection with teeth and claws and she imagines his hand on her, slipped past the waistband, pulling her panties aside, and inserting one long finger into her sopping wet cunt.
They hiss, both of them. He feels confused for another half of a second. The churn in him stutters. The cocktail of drugs in her makes this dream of him all the more sweet. His hand moves and she cries out, almost blacks out from the pressure against her throat and the curl of his finger inside her.
She kisses him this time. Cradles his face between her hands and seeks his tongue out. He indulges her, lets her surge into his mouth the way his finger thrusts into her. A sinful duet and neither of them really know who’s leading. His finger inside her scrambles her brain entirely, sends her thoughts scattering, leaving only some wretched thing gasping and moaning under him. His callouses hit her in all the right spots, and he moves with such expert ease. It's just a single finger but it's such a snug fit inside her. How will she ever take him whole?
He mumbles her name into her mouth, into her neck. It sounds so good when he says it. The single syllable sings in the timbre of his voice. Grace, Grace, Grace.
She wants to possess him, consume him, make him hers. All hers.
I have nothing, she had told him. All she has is him, and she intends to keep. She reaches out, shoves her hands under his shirt and scratches his skin, hard, digging in, in, making sure she leaves marks for his wife to find. She feels ugly and disgusting, feels a blanketing of his tar-like infection dig into her mind and his own, like it can travel and corrupt her too. But she knows there was corruption inside her this whole time. She's a sick, twisted thing that moans louder into his mouth when she feels the brush of his ring against her clit as he fits his full finger into her, all the way to the hilt.
She keens, and croons and begs him for more like a depraved, disgusting creature. Mindless, raw. He brings his thumb to her sensitive bud but it's the cold silver band that sends her over the edge, crashing over waves and waves of pleasure that burns out all the light in her until there's only shame left, and the ring. The brush of it against her folds is a splash of ice cold water. A cattle prod right against her chest.
“No!” she screams out. “S-Stop, stop!”
She lets go of him, of his face, the infection, the hands, and she pushes him back. All of him. The person, and the virus. The man, and the blackened rot she had foolishly dug her fingers into.
He stumbles against the headboard, with far more force than she had pushed him with, which was nothing at all. His eyes are clouded for a moment, like hers, and then he blinks and the blindness fades, and he finds her. Still on the bed, gasping for air. A sacrificial lamb laid on the altar.
She feels the infection crumbling out of him, slipping through her fingers faster than she can hold. He looks down at his hands, sticky and wet with her, and at the dark spiderweb that begins to fade faster than her bruises, but she’s looking at his ring. Silver. Or maybe platinum. Definitely a wedding band. What else could it be?
She catches one last dot of the infection before everything slips away from her, claws her fingers down on it, twists it around his heart. The churning expands as he looks at her, almost in awe.
He leans down, gives her a chaste kiss on the corner of her mouth. “Good girl,” he whispers against her lips.
The ring burns her skin. She shivers. She wants to cry, wants to throw up, wants to kiss him again. The tears leave her without permission, and he picks her up, cradles her against himself tenderly as if she didn’t just make him violate her. But he wouldn’t know that, would he? All he knows is that she made him stop, and killed his infection in the process.
That tiny dot pulsates in him, and she can still feel everything he feels, see everything he sees. Her head swims, her cunt weeps, and she feels sick and dirty, but still she wants him. She wants more. She wants—
“I want to go home,” she whispers against his chest. “Please.”
That little cage he put her in. Inside her glass bottle. She wants to curl up in her own bed and disappear into nothing, into sleep, or to yesterday, when she had all of him, and he wasn’t fucking married.
*
He lifts her in his arms and carries her to where she assumes at first is her room.
Her head is against his neck, breathing in the scent of him. Something woody and sweaty. It soothes her. She could just lay here, pretend there’s nothing else beside this moment.
It’s when she feels a cooling breeze, the honk of cars, and a light patter of rain on her that she opens his eyes and looks up.
They’re outside. He’s carrying her to a car. The same black thing from last time. Sleek, dark, expensive. Suits him, she thinks as he unlocks it from a distance. Her head is still muddled so she lets him place her in the passenger seat, and buckle her in.
She waits for him to sit behind the wheel, start the car. But he heaves a sigh as he puts his seatbelt on, and just leaves his hands on the wheel and stares ahead. There’s some bone-deep tiredness to him. Is he not happy to have been healed? Is he not happy to have been proven right? Is he—is he upset she made him cheat on his wife? Made him finger her with the same hand he holds the evidence of his vows in. Made him make her cry and shake and delirious with twisted pleasure.
Where’s his wife, she wonders. What’s her name? Or is there a husband?
Is it Sherry? Or that Chris Redfield person she’s heard them mention every once in a while? Or someone else entirely. Someone he keeps separate from his work life, and the ugliness of it.
“Wh-Where are we going?” she asks.
Is he taking her to his spouse—to be thrown at their feet so she can beg for mercy? Forgiveness? Or to be burnt alive at the stake? A witch, a whore, a slut.
He doesn’t answer her for so long she almost believes he didn’t hear her. His head is bowed, like he’s thinking through his decision but eventually he turns to look at her. The sorry little thing he allowed to ruin him.
“Home,” he says, softly, gently, eyes on her lips. “Taking you home.”