Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

In another, gentler life, Grace Ashcroft had a job, an apartment she barely spent time in, a revolver she was just learning how to use, and the ghost of a dead mother. In this life, she has the perpetual prick of an IV, cold hands that hold her down while she sobs, and an endless, yawning darkness behind her open eyes.

Sometimes she dreams of the rain, while she lies in her bed, strapped to it. She remembers the sound, the chatter against the concrete, and the clean, sharp smell of wet soil. Just before the—just before, in that life she never had, Grace had started gardening. Just an experimental hobby she’d tried picking up to take time off the screens. Funnily enough everything she learned about the plants she’d bought on a whim, everything she did to take care of them came from reddit. She got into mixing her own potting soil, following tutorials, guides, and her own failures. Her apartment was small, and kind of dingy, so she got grow lights. She was in the process of figuring a self-watering system when—

Well, when.

When she was made to realise that life was never hers.

She wonders if the care center has plants. And if so, who takes care of them? Not the same doctors and nurses who tend to Grace. None of them seem like the type. Not Victor either. He doesn’t have the temperament. He hardly has the patience for Grace, and she’s his favourite toy.

Victor likes breaking things, Grace has come to realise. He likes pulling things apart, seeing all the little bits inside, seeing them tick and beat, and then he likes mixing them up, putting different parts in different places, or adding new things to the mix. He doesn’t put things back though, at least not the way he found them.

In that other life, that dream one of hers, Grace would have gotten a thrill being able to study this monster of a man. To read about him, find out all the little crumbs of information, comb through his life history and put together a perfect picture of everything that matters. It would be an interesting project, one of the cases that would make her stay late at work, come home at dawn, crash out, and then rinse and repeat. A lovely life to dream about, to pass the time.

Time is one thing that is painfully slow at the care center. Nothing happens. Nothing that’s good anyway. It’s always one experiment after the other, sometimes painful, sometimes not. Sometimes Grace can rest and just let her mind wander while the doctors and Victor do whatever it is they want to do. The pain is just background noise, and she can slip into that old life she may or may not have had. Think of some of the cases she was in the middle of solving, figure out a better watering schedule for her plants.

But then, there are those other times. Times when the pain is all she is. Not a person, just nerve endings on fire until being conscious is too much, and then she is nothing. Nothing and no one. Not a girl, not an FBI analyst, not a sad thing on the floor, not even alive.

Huh, she must have never been alive.

Mid-afternoon they come for her again, and it’s one of the nothing days. It’s raining outside, cats and dogs, thunder, lightning (not that she can see that), howling winds. Maybe hail. If she makes a run for it, maybe she’ll die in the pouring torrent and maybe that will feel like healing.

She doesn’t try though. She’s tried before and it…wasn’t worth what they took from her. She only thinks about running. Feet slapping on the floor, air burning her lungs, wind, gunfire, blood. In some of these daydreams, they shoot her down. In some of them she makes it all the way to the courtyard, gets to feel the fresh breeze, grass and stone under her feet instead of cold tiles.

They strap her down for the procedure. She’s already been pumped full of drugs before being taken out of the room so Grace goes down easy. No protest, no peep. She knows better by now. Why scream when no one’s listening?

They begin. Slowly at first, and then like the lightning outside. Grace slips into the comfortable sleeve of despair, hopes for death, asks for it even. Politely. Sweetly, the way Victor likes it. No luck.

She remains there, for days, weeks, years. Could be years. Feels like years. On the table. No eyes to see, no mouth to beg, no mother to cry for. Straps, an IV full of poison, and knives that slice and remake her. Over and over again. Days, weeks, months.

She sleeps, she loses consciousness, she waits. Sometimes, she hums, some sweet thing her mother that never existed used to sing to her. Calming, soothing. It irritates Victor but Grace stopped trying to please him a long time ago. Nothing pleases Victor more than pain and Grace can’t give any more than she already has.

Eventually, she sleeps once more.

*

She feels it when the first infected breach containment. Grace wakes up when the sirens begin to shrill. There’s a loud explosion, from somewhere that feels far away and thrillingly near. There are screams around her, staff that are scrabbling to evacuate.

Frantic hands begin to undo her straps. “Get Subject Zero to the East Wing. Hurry!”

Voices, voices all around her. All panicked. Where’s Victor? Not here. She would have felt it. She would have known. A gurgle. A scream. The infected are here. Hands that were trying to hold her up disappear. Carnage follows.

Grace drops down on the floor, unsteadily. Her knees knock against the tiles but she doesn’t utter a sound. Just crawls to the nearest corner and makes herself small. She tries to cradle herself in her own arms (who else is there?). Sways back and forth while whatever must happen, happens around her.

She closes her eyes that no longer work and slips into the eyes of the closest infected thing. When they remade her, when they took from her, they also gave. She can’t see but she can see what others like her can. Sometimes she watches herself with Victor’s eyes until bile rises up her throat.

The room is beautifully damaged, scattered with corpses and their viscera. She watches with eyes that are not her own as an infected patient with a busted jaw pulls out the arm of a nurse. He screams, alive for now, and in pain. Good, Grace thinks. Must be fun. She would partake but she’s not that kind of a monster yet. For now she’s just a voyeur. Bring out the popcorn, she’s about to witness a massacre.

She sways, and hums to herself and lets the infected do their work. She jumps from eye to eye, watching, just watching. And waiting for Victor to come and stop the party. Shouldn’t be long now. Ten more minutes, maybe?

Ten minutes pass. Her room clears of the living and the dead begin to file out. They don’t mind Grace. She’s more or less one of them. She sits in the corner, obediently. The thought of escape isn’t even a consideration. They cut that out of her a long time ago. She just waits. Like a good girl. Watching, humming, soothing herself.

Outside the room, it’s almost the same. Blood everywhere. The siren wails and wails. Somewhere, in a different wing maybe, there’s a distant sound of gunfire. Curiously, Grace reaches and looks for eyes there.

It’s a long stretch. She’s not tried going this far yet. She eventually finds one infected, stumbling messily. The view from its eyes is grainy, like there’s static between them. Grace blinks, the infected blinks and catches something coming at her—at it. She—they—it stumbles forward, reaching, and like a polaroid picture breathing to life, she sees him. First the silhouette, then the eyes, then the gun.

She hears the slaughter next. The slam of bullets, the howls, the screams. The spray of blood like rain she hasn’t felt on her skin in so long. He’s a quiet, deadly thing. Must be beautiful too, she imagines. She can’t see him clearly yet. Heavy footsteps, a grunt, the boom of a rifle (or something she assumes to be one). She basks in the music of it, and tries to stumble closer. She nudges the infected body, tells it to move, forward, forward, go find him, go touch him.

She only catches the briefest glimpse of him before he ducks behind the thing that is and isn’t her and blows its brains out. Grace feels a strange twist in her gut, a prickling of pleasure she didn’t expect. Oh, death would be so sweet, and she was right—he’s beautiful.

Where did he come from? Who is he? Police maybe. But he isn’t in uniform. FBI? Did they finally notice she was missing? Unlikely. Or some secret agency, working against people like Victor? A-a bio-terror agency, she feels her rusty brain supply. There was one she knew of. The Division of Security something. Is that what he is? Has he been sent to clean out Victor’s dirty projects? Will he…is he here to kill her, she wonders with a thrill.

Has the universe finally sent her a saviour? To finally, finally free her. Bring her peace. A beautiful bullet to her brain.

It was going to happen eventually, she was hopeful. When she realised what they were making of her, she thought surely someone out there would be sent to stop it. And if not, to eventually stop her. It’s how these things go. Monsters should die, even unwilling ones.

The second infected she piggybacks makes sure to stay at a cautious distance, or rather she sends along a suggestion for it so she has a longer time to admire and gaze like a teenage girl with a crush on her much, much older uncle-like family friend.

He blows out the brains of this one as well. So, she moves on to the next, and then the next, and the next. She makes a trail for him. Infected in line from the West Wing to her. Praying he'll find her before Victor comes back.

She likes the jacket he has on, she decides. It would feel warm. It’s been a long time since Grace has felt warmth. Maybe he’ll let her wear it before he kills her? She could ask. Please, sir. I’ll be a good monster. I won’t bite.

By the time he reaches her, the care center is silent. Empty. Just her and him. A monster and a hunter. There are no dead eyes for her to look at him with so she turns her head in the direction of him. Footsteps, breathing, and the tick, tick, tick of a watch. She’d missed that detail of him in her surveillance.

He startles when he sees her. She hears the hitch in his steps. 

“Shit,” she hears him say. A beautiful voice to match a beautiful face.

She wishes he had left at least one pair of eyes for her to see him with. She tries to follow him with her useless ones. Tries gets up, unsteady with the drugs still dancing in her blood. She uses the wall to support herself as she hears him take a step towards her, cautious. He must be pointing the gun at her, she hopes. She considers making a wail-like noise, pretend she’s mindless and maybe he’ll stop hesitating and take the shot.

“Grace Ashcroft?” he asks.

Her head slams up. Her knees shake.

How? What?

The first thing she thinks is that this is some sick test. Victor’s watching her, to see what she will do. She if she’ll run, disobey him again, make a fool of herself. She knows he has cameras all over the facility. But would he burn his care centre down for a thing like this? Maybe, maybe. For his favourite toy? Anything.

“Grace?” he asks, softer this time. Another tentative step. “My name’s Leon. Kennedy. I'm with the DSO.”

A gentle hand on her elbow. Gloved. Sticky with blood. She jumps.

“Hey, shh. It’s okay.”

She’s shivering. A sound escapes her that she can’t define. Animalistic, whimpering, sad and small.

He says something but it sounds faraway to her. Underwater. She stops understanding, stops listening, stops trying. Victor’s games never fail to break her. She’d been stupid enough to think they were over because she’s been behaving herself for a good few months, but that must have been so boring.

Her shaky hands find his hand, the one with the gun. Also gloved, and the gun is warm under her fingers. Recently fired. She hopes there’s at least one bullet left. One last to do the job. She cradles it with both hands, and brings it to her mouth. Fingers scrabble to find the trigger.

It sits heavy on her tongue for one glorious second before he, before Leon pulls it away.

“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” he says. Doesn’t yell it, the way Victor would have. He says it so quietly. Gravel in his voice. Tough. Stern. She feels a lick of shame, and another confusing touch of desire.

“I-I-I wan’t—” the words aren’t leaving her. She doesn’t speak much anymore. Only screams, so she’s a bit rusty. “I w-want to go home,” she finally blurts. She wants to see her mother.

Silence. Just breathing. A hand comes to the back of her neck, holds her tight. In place. A thumb against her jaw.

“So," he says, softly, "you speak.”

It’s such a lovely voice. Like a balm against her. What other things could she make him say? She wants to keep him talking, but they don’t have time. 

“P-P-Please,” she says. “B-Before he comes back.”

“Who?”

She’s shaking. She tries scrambling for the gun again but when she pulls, his arm doesn’t give.

“Before who comes back, Grace?” There’s something compelling about his voice, something that begs to be answered.

“V-Victor.”

“Victor Gideon?” 

“Y-Yesss.” It comes out as something of a hiss.

The thumb against her jaw swipes towards her lips, back at her jaw. Back and forth, making her warm and dizzy.

“Gideon isn’t here,” he says. “Searched the whole place. No sign of him.”

She shakes her head. “He’ll be b-b-back.” He’s always back to witness the last leg of his games.

The thumb stops. Leon takes it away. Her skin stings from the loss, she wants it back. It’s been so long since she’s been touched without it causing her pain. So, so long. A quiet keening noise leaves her.

He finds her hand, wraps his fingers around her thin wrist. “Come on, then,” he says. “We should hurry.”

Her knees lock, her whole body freezes.

Hurry? Hurry where? He can shoot her here, leave her here, can’t he?. They don’t have to go elsewhere. Victor will find them.

“No!” she yells it. Shrieks. Wrenches her hand away from him. The floor finds her again. Cold, comforting. The last time she left—

No, no, no.

No.

“Hey,” he’s by her side in a second. “Grace?”

She makes a small noise. A trapped animal. Blind. Alone. Wings cut off. Victor said he’ll do exactly that if she tries to leave.

“You wanted to go home, right? Let’s go home.”

Why did she say that? She doesn’t have a home. She shakes her head. “I c-can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

No. No. “T-They’ll hurt me. If-If I leave. If I t-try.”

Leon takes a step back. Silence. He gets it. He’ll walk away. The game will end. Grace only wishes she could have ended with it.

“There’s no one left to hurt you, Grace,” he tells her gently. “They’re all dead.”

She sniffles.

They are. There’s not a single soul here but them. Not one eye left for her to see through. He had torn through the dark. She had seen that. A hatchet in his hands. A bloody dance.

She feels those hands on her now, under her knees, and he picks her up like she weighs nothing. She wants to struggle but she's scared. He's so big he could hurt her so bad and still leave her alive. Struggling never helps. They like her obedient.

“Gonna need you to hold on to me,” he says. “Need a hand free in case of stragglers.”

She clutches at him, arms around his neck. He’s made of pure muscle. Doesn’t even flinch. Just grunts as he gets up with her. But the game—her mind worries. Victor will not want this. She’s not supposed to leave. But she has to be obedient too.

Her hands clutch harder, nails dig in. Leon hisses but doesn’t complain.

DSO, he had said. Division of Security Operations. Founded in 2011 by President Benford, later assassinated. The government’s very own counter bio-terrorism unit, answerable directly to the White House.

Can Victor fake that? Find some insane mountain of a man to clear out his precious care center, pretend to be part of a formidable government agency just to see if poor Gracie will make a run for it? Unlikely, but…but—

And then there’s the name. Kennedy. She remembers reading that somewhere. Founding member. One of the first DSO operatives. Would Victor spin a web this tight? Would he go through the trouble of a backstory? He’d never bothered before.

“You good over there?” Leon asks.

She brings her face close to his neck, to feel the skin there, know that this is a real person. He runs warm, hot almost. And feels so good so close up. Solid. Breathing. And he's not hurting her. Yet. She rests her mouth against the crook of his neck, feels the soft tickle of his hair against her cheek, thee scratch of his stubble. Gunpowder, smoke, sweat, blood. And…and…

Oh. She flinches. Oh.

Infected.

He grunts. “Easy there.”

She blinks, and then sees herself from his eyes. A small girl in the cradle of large arms. In a thin hospital gown, matted hair, chapped lips. Her eyes are clouded, but they were grey before that. Once upon a time that doesn’t exist. She looks nothing like her FBI issued ID photo. That girl is nowhere to be found.

This was...this was too good to be true. Of course it was. Of course he was. She wants to cry but what would be the point? This is how all games end.

“W-Where’s Victor?” she asks him solemnly.

He stops. “Dunno. Like I said, he wasn’t—”

“Are you taking me to him?”

He stops. Looks at her. Really looks at her. She blinks, he blinks. “You think I work for Victor Gideon.”

She nods.

“I don’t.”

She’s heard that before. “I don’t believe you.”

She feels the pull of his mouth into a crooked smile, doesn’t see it because all she’s looking at is herself. Sad, and still in his arms. Resigned.

“Why?” he asks.

“V-Victor likes games.”

He frowns. “I’d show you my badge but…” He leaves that pointedly between them.

He sighs. “I don’t work for Victor. I’m here because DSO caught wind of his shady little post-Umbrella vacation life here and we frown on bio-terror hobbies.”

“Y-You knew my name.”

“Yeah, this whole case was kind of built around you,” he says. “Got your superiors all alarmed when their untrained analyst disappeared from an active crime scene.”

She winces. “You’re infected.” She throws her last argument, lets it slap him on the forehead.

He grunts. Adjusts her in his arms. “Yeah. And?”

“Why would the DSO send an infected agent?”

He shugs. “Haven’t turned yet.” A smile. “Don’t worry, won’t bite you.”

I could bite you, she thinks. See how he’d like that. When she doesn’t laugh, doesn’t say anything, he sighs again. He turns his eyes, her eyes on the hallway before them. Flickering lights, bodies on the floor. A plant in the corner, in a large ceramic pot. A philodendron. Drooping. In need of water. Somewhere, in the farthest ends, there’s a soft scraping noise coming closer, inch by inch.

“If you don’t believe me,” he says, “I can leave you right here. Tell the FBI their lost agent was nowhere to be found and you can run back to dear Victor.”

No, please.

“Or,” he pauses. His voice turns low, and a little nasty, “I could shove my gun back down your pretty little mouth. I’ll make it quick. Tell your bosses you turned. Clean end.”

She says nothing but feels an electric trill at the thought of it.

The scrabbling and scratching from the hallway closes in. Grace switches eyes from Leon’s to the infected doctor. It’s on the floor, crawling towards them. From Leon’s eyes she can see it’s only half a body, and when she switches back to it, she sees herself in Leon’s arms, all cosy like she’s made herself comfortable.

“What will it be?” he asks her. He looks comfortable as well, holding her all too easily, one arm under her legs, and one holding a revolver. A magnum, she notes. Was this the thing making all the noise this whole time? How is a revolver packing so much power? How is this one man? He’s looking at her with a kind of tenderness she wishes she could memorise. He’ll really kill her if she asks. And maybe he’ll keep looking at her like this the whole time. Maybe even talk her through it.

“I-I believe you,” she lies.

He grins, lifts his gun at the eyes down the hallway and shoots it. Through him she sees the head explode. Rain too far away from her skin. She sighs.

“Hold this,” he hands her the gun. It pulls her down with its weight as he rummages his belt for something. He replaces the gun just as swiftly as he gave it with something else. A round-ish, flat, but bulky metallic thing.

“Badge,” he explains.

Her greedy fingers study the grooves and edges. The letters D, S, O, and the little stars between them, the carved wings framing the insignia. She felt the grooves of similar ones running down the grip of his revolver. Tentatively she takes a bite out of it, like a gold-medalist. The rumble of Leon’s laughter travels up from his chest to her fingertips.

He walks them out slowly. Like they have all the time in the world, checking every corridor on their way, making sure the monsters are all gone. Grace holds on until she feels cool, fresh air on her skin. She almost falls off his grip. Breeze. There’s a breeze. They’re outside.

His eyes show her the sky. Dark and dotted with stars. The courtyard is gloriously green, and wet with rain. In the distance there is a fire, but before them is a car. Dark, sleek. Leon takes her to it.

Fuck, he wasn’t lying. They’re leaving. She’s leaving. He’s taking her away. He holsters his gun, opens the door for her and deposits her kindly in the passenger seat. Leather, soft.

He walks around the car and takes a seat behind the wheel.

“Last chance,” he tells her. “Could still take you to Gideon.”

She shivers, and he chuckles at the fear in her skin. He reaches forward, brushes against her as he buckles the seatbelt in for her. His badge is still warm under her fingers.

“You done with that?” he asks.

She clutches it harder.

“Okay then.” he says. “Just one last thing.”

She watches through him as he pries one hand from the badge, brings it close to himself, and snaps a picture of the tag on her wrist.

Grace Ashcroft, 28, F. Patient Zero - Elpis.

He starts the car.

“Sherry,” she hears him say to nobody. “Package is secure. Send in the Wolves.”

Chapter Text

They call him at the ass crack of dawn about one Grace Ashcroft. Apparently the girl’s not co-operating. They need mean old Kennedy to come get her in line. Or, coerce. Whatever he’s in the mood for. That, and she specifically asked for him. Has been asking for a good while now.

Guess she’s not all too happy about more doctors taking blood samples and whatnot from her after whatever fuckery they did to her at the care center. Huh, who would have thought? Certainly not Leon. Not like he told the suits exactly that but why would they listen to him? He’s only a soldier, a loyal hound. Nothing more, nothing less. Not a fucking therapist. Not his fucking job.

And now the wounded little deer he dragged out of the woods is asking for him. Not bad enough he sunk his teeth into her and dragged her broken little body straight to the wolves. What now, she wants him to maul her too?

He drags his ass from bed, showers, makes himself a nice cup of coffee, adds two necessary fingers of whiskey, and drives himself to work. Sherry finds him at reception. Of course they called her in too. She looks like she’s ready to drop. He offers her a swig of his flask but the ungrateful woman declines.

“Why did they call you?” he asks.

Sherry yawns. “A kind face for the girl maybe?”

Leon huffs. “I can be kind.”

Sherry pats him. “You look like you have one foot in the grave and you’re mad about it.”

“So? She’s blind. I could have my dick on my face and it wouldn’t matter.”

He wonders what they did to her exactly. Grace had her full vision when she was with the FBI. Well, most of it. He remembers seeing cute little glasses on her nose in her ID photo.

He read some of the lab reports while he was at the facility looking for Elpis, and it wasn’t pretty. The descriptions were clinical, more result oriented, but the procedures were noted and they were—

Bad. Bad enough that he didn’t read all of it. He’s retrieved more data on her but hasn’t gone through them yet either. Left that to the analysts. A dying man shouldn’t have to do homework. He should have been given an early retirement, a nice bottle of whiskey, and a sweet bullet to the head by the seaside.

Instead he gets called in at 4am to soothe a crying girl. Who’s going to soothe him? He has problems too.

The infected patches of skin itch. Sometimes it burns, a steady digging feeling, like taking a hot knife to his nerves. It gets even more fun at nights when his whole body feels like it’s decomposing while he’s still alive and kicking. Sleep’s even better when you make it spicy. They sting right now, as he walks the halls of the Wrenwood DSO branch they have Grace at. They’ve kept her pretty deep in, eight floors down, in a shitty imitation of a hospital room. Bulletproof fibreglass, and steel walls. Ugly white furniture, a plastic plant, and all sharp things removed.

The way she had placed his gun in her pretty, pink mouth. Fuck. That picture is engraved in the ugly wrinkles of his brain. He might just bring it out the next time he’s not able to sleep and needs a little push. The dazed, creamy eyes, the shaky little hands, tears against her cheeks, and the taut string of saliva—

Well, if he doubted he’s going to hell, he sure is now. But as much as he’d like to see her try again, they can’t have her succeeding in anything of that sort.

Elpis has turned out to be so much more than the initial intel the DSO had gathered. Grace Ashcroft is not a lost FBI analyst. She’s about to become the DSO foremost weapon in fighting bio-terror. What an honour. Slap a medal on that girl’s trauma and throw her in the burning fire. And leash a feral dog to her side so she knows where to go, whom to kill. Good girl, good dog.

Leon hopes he’ll only be there for a little bit of it. Just the fun parts, before the infection takes over. Let Grace Ashcroft be someone else’s problem. And maybe they’ll also find a cure for Sherry after that.

For now, though…

He enters the glass prison without knocking or preamble. She’s a government asset now. A dog just like him. Well, a kitten at this stage but same difference. Her face lights up when she senses him. And how the fuck she can do that? Knew he was infected too, without eyes, without being told. The answer is probably somewhere in the files he didn’t bother to read.

“Leon,” she says. A statement. No doubts it’s him.

She’s seated on the bed, in a thin gown, not dissimilar to the one she had on at the care centre. Her hair is clean and combed. Soft and downey. Her cheeks are red, and her neck and face are covered in scratches. Her arms too, probably but she’s been put in a straitjacket for now. Cute.

She turns her head towards him, swings her legs on her bed like it’s nothing but there’s a slight tremble in her lower lip.

“Nice digs,” he tells her.

She makes a show of looking around. “T-Thanks. Moved in recently.” Her voice wobbles. Good thing he left Sherry outside. She might have suggested a hug or something equally horrible.

Instead, Leon takes a tentative seat next to Grace. The bed creaks as the mattress goes down from his weight. Just like half of his joints.

“You left,” she says quietly. Not really an accusation yet but has the potential to mutate.

She had fallen asleep in the car. The doctors told him she had been drugged out, and would be gone for quite a bit. So, of course he went home. He has no business with her anymore. Extraction complete. Asset handed to custody. Not his fault she woke up crying and screaming. And apparently scratching her own face off. He feels a slight twinge of guilt but shoves it down. Bleeding hearts get you nowhere. He can’t be going around bringing strays home, even if he has a soft spot for the blonde ones.

“If I stick around,” he says, “you’ll let the docs do their thing?”

She looks defeated. “W-Why? I’m s-sure there were records. O-Of what they d-did to me.”

Too many, he thinks. “They need to know how…stable you are right now.”

“And then w-w-what?”

He shrugs. Realises she can’t see it, and says, “Dunno. Above my paygrade.”

It isn’t. He knows what happens next. Just figures it’s not on him to tell her. Might freak her out and right now he needs to get her to cooperate so he can go back home, beat one out, and slip into a nice, comfortable coma.

“You said,” a hitch in her voice. “Y-You said you’d take me h-home.”

And you believed me, he wants to say. Wants to shake her and tell her she’s a fool. Wants to tell her she should never, ever trust anyone, especially someone with a badge and a gun, but she had a badge and gun once (did she try to put her standard issue between her lips as well?). You’d think that someone like her who’s been burned so badly would flinch before trusting the likes of him.

“In case you couldn’t tell,” he says, “I lied.”

She doesn’t look disappointed. Just stares unseeingly at the wall. He wonders what home he could have even taken her to. Her apartment was repossessed ages ago, and her stuff put in storage. The FBI will have access to that, but a home? That’s all gone for her. Maybe she was thinking of that mother of hers that got her throat slashed in the Wrenwood Hotel. Sick of Victor to kidnap the girl from there, even sicker of her boss to have sent her there in the first place.

Leon intends to have a few words with Nathan Dempsy one of these days, maybe get his finances checked out too while he’s at it. Freeze a few assets here and there, throw in some suspicion and drama, see where that gets him.

“Why did you ask for me?” He needs to know. Surely he’s no longer in her good graces.

“I-I don’t have anyone else,” she says.

Fuck him. Just…fuck. Having him around is worse than having no one but he won’t tell her that. Let her find out by herself. Lessons and all that.

“I can’t take you home,” he tells her bluntly.

“I know.” Resigned, quiet. “I just—” A deep breath. “Can-can you s-stay? I-I don’t like needles.”

He reaches the straps of her jacket behind her back. “And you’ll behave?”

She nods. He pulls the first clasp. The second, third, and untangles her arms and hands, throws the whole thing to the side. She shivers in her thin shift, looking as small as she did the first time he laid eyes on her. Like a kitten in the rain, begging to be brought back home.

The second she’s free, she clutches at him blindly until she finds his arm and sinks her claws in. He lets them stay for a moment, savoring the sting that works to balance the prickling of the infection, before he untangles her grasp and brings her hand into his, pushing his fingers into the space between hers. He rests their hands solidly on his thigh and motions for Sherry to call in the doctors.

She scratched out her own arms, and a few of the medical staff. They come in sulking but they’re gentle with her. Leon makes sure of it. Her hand stays in his, clenching, unclenching with each needle that they bring her. At some point she begins humming in a throaty voice. Not loud enough, just something self-soothing he figures. For her own ears probably but it’s cute. His thumb swipes back and forth against her. Behind the gloves the infection itches.

“So,” he says. “What are you doing after this?” Just something to distract her.

It makes her laugh like he wanted it to. Makes him feel accomplished.

“G-Go for a walk. M-Maybe,” she says. “What about you?”

“Taking you out for ice cream.”

“W-What?” The alarm in her makes him feel funny.

“Ice-cream,” he repeats. “I heard all the kids get it after a shot.”

She frowns. “I’m not a kid.”

He doesn’t think of her as a kid anyway. “Adults can have ice-cream too.”

The hand on his tightens. An injection on her arm. She tries regulating her breathing.

“C-Can we?” she asks after a while. “Actually go for ice cream?”

He wouldn’t mind. Feeling like a blackcurrant cone right now. “Not today,” he says. Probably not ever.

The tests go on for almost an hour. Lots of blood draws, some swabs. There’ll be more of it the next day but when the medical staff eventually file out, the relief in Grace is palpable. She looks wrung out. Worn. He extracts his hand from hers. It’s gone numb now. Girl has a good grip, even if she's kinda dainty. She grabs tight for a second longer and finally lets go.

“You good?” She’s shaking.

“Yeah,” she says.

Liar. But what can he do about it? Nothing. Just because he found the stray doesn’t mean it’s his responsibility. She holds her hands between her knees, presses hard, looks off into the distance. That lower lip keeps trembling. The goddam slip they gave her is too thin. He can see the outline of her tits, the small shadow of her nipples.

“You should get some sleep,” he says. “I’ll come back.” He’ll have to. She’s not his problem but this is his circus.

He takes his jacket off, wraps it around her slight frame, and doesn't try to linger. Eyes up. No need to check out the traumatised girl. Her fingers immediately grasp at the leather. She buries her face in the lining.

“T-Thanks,” she mumbles. “S-See you tomorrow?”

He leaves before he can do anything else stupid.

*

It becomes a routine. Get up, get to Grace, hold her hand, make small talk to distract her while more tests are set up.

Her blood panel turns out a lot more anomalies. Some expected, some not so much. And a few things are left hanging in the air for which they’d have to conduct tests of their own. Leon signs off on all the non-invasive ones. Doesn’t tell her about the long list he got, and the kind of ideas the DSO doctors had. It’s not just Umbrella who employs sick fucks. The government has their own too. Just look at him.

He stays back at the HQ on Wednesday night to go through the entirety of the Elpis report the analysts put together from combing all the data he had shared from the care centre. Sherry joins him and between the two of them they read every gnarly detail, look at every photograph, watch every single recording without skipping. Leon doesn’t flinch. Sherry gets up and takes a break at the halfway point.

They sit out the whole night with takeaway beef noodles and hours and hours of Grace Ashcroft’s life for the past two years. There’s a three minute video of her begging while she’s cut open that makes Sherry slam her laptop shut and put her head on her hands. Leon just pauses to take a bite of his food.

“You don’t have to do this with me,” he tells her.

Sherry just shakes her head.

They both read up on Grace's time before the kidnapping. Lived alone, no friends, no family. Work was her whole life, and somehow they didn’t even notice her absence for a whole week. By then, Victor Gideon had cleaned up after himself, wiped out all the footsteps and disappeared off with his prize.

“We’re catching this guy,” Sherry says, full of conviction. Righteous anger for a girl she’s only said hi to once when Leon allowed it.

“Not our job,” he says.

“Fuck that!” Sherry is screaming.

“We have other problems. We’re dying.”

“Well, fuck that too.”

The infection has been getting worse, slowly crawling up his body. He’s started having occasional bouts of coughing, and a few dizzy spells. Sometimes there’s blood. He’s gritted his way through it but he knows Sherry’s going through the same thing. Their time is running out, and Victor Gideon doesn’t have the answers to that. His entire focus was on Elpis, and Elpis, as it turns out, is just a weapon that has the DSO bigwigs nutting in their pants now.

That is, if Grace can deliver what she’s supposed to. The tests Gideon ran did not offer the desired results, but there were notes that suggested that the subject might have been holding out. That or she needed a more compelling push.

Before they could get to that part of the testing, Leon had burst in and burnt the place down, so of course now it falls on him to find out what potential Elpis truly carries.

“I can’t believe she survived all that,” Sherry murmurs.

Leon sighs. “Don’t think she wanted to.”

The reason Grace is such a good prisoner at the DSO now, other than the initial, let’s call it reluctance, is that Gideon did a splendid job breaking her. She did not think she would escape, didn’t think it would be possible, and now that she’s in another cage, she’s just resigned to her fate.

Helps that Leon isn’t cutting out her organs, but let’s see how she feels about him after tomorrow.

The next morning he brings her a scoop of butterscotch. The face she makes when her hands wrap around the paper cup will haunt him for days. Probably years depending on how bad things go for her.

He woke up with half his body on fire. The infection has reached the side of his face. If he wasn’t ugly before, he’s absolutely horrendous now. He needs to be out there, looking for something that could help him and Sherry. He needs to be out in the field, not fucking babysitting a lost girl turned bio-weapon. But his orders were clear, and Leon is nothing if not an obedient dog. Licks all the right boots, waits patiently for his food, drags the rabbit back to his masters, lets them put her in a glass case and holds her hand while they prepare her for slaughter.

A good fucking soldier.

They’ve finally given her some actual clothes. Clinical green pants and a t-shirt, and even a fucking bra. He catches an eye of the thick black strap when she leans down to take a whiff of his coffee. The instant regret on her face is beautiful.

“W-Why does your coffee smell like vodka?”

“What coffee?” he says, taking a sip.

She’s wearing his jacket. Has made a whole show of claiming it for herself. The one time he tried taking it back, she scratched him. Hellcat.

He’s in no mood to be nice this morning but something about Grace’s face reminds him of the girl on the table, begging and crying. Three minutes and the video had cut out but he’s sure it went on for much longer. Two years worth.

“C-Can I have some?” she asks.

He looks at the nearest doctor. A shake of her head. He sighs. “I’m being told no.”

She reaches for the mug anyway. He pulls her back by the back of her shirt collar. “Behave.”

She sits back with her ice-cream. Greedy little shit. Wants his stuff but won’t offer anything of hers. Didn’t her mother beat that out of her before she kicked the bucket? Teach her nothing?

He lets it go. Today’s going to be a tough day. The day that decides how useful she can actually be. Hence the ice cream for her, the drink for him. He lets her sit and eat in peace for a bit. It’s not that he’s procrastinating, he’s trying to figure out the best way to do this.

She keeps her milky eyes on the ice-cream as she savours it slowly, but he knows the gears in her head are turning. He lets her stew as he enjoys his coffee and his view. Her cheeks are dusted pink, a pretty, stark colour against her pale skin. Wet, red lips, and an equally wet tongue around the plastic spoon. Suction as she savours, and the licks like she’s not had a sweet treat for too long.

On a cold table, saying please, please, please. Red knives and she has tears—

There’s a small smudge on her cheek that bothers him. No manners on the girl. She’s eating like she was never raised at all. The wolf in him wants to lick off the ice-cream from her skin but instead he swipes at it with a gloved hand and pops it into his mouth to taste.

Her eyes widen with shock as if she could see, but she keeps her silence, and so he looks away and joins her in saying nothing.

When the medical staff eventually file out, he waits a little longer. Lets her finish off the rest of her treat and lick the bowl too before he gets up and holds a hand out. She pretends to not know what he’s doing. Pretends to not sense it, or whatever it is that she does because even if she can’t see with her eyes exactly, Leon knows she has some unnatural instinct or intuition that’s a nice little by-product of her time under the knife.

He sighs when she makes no move. He takes the paper cup from her hands, spoon, and the last few drops of the melted butterscotch, throws it in the trash, and then grabs her by the arm.

“Come on,” he says. “Field trip.”

She doesn’t seem surprised. Doesn’t ask questions. Leon’s noticed that a lot too. She’s very hesitant to ask things, making requests even, and absolutely never, ever say no. At least not to him. And certainly not firm enough. She’d sat in her nothing little tissue of a slip for a good two days before he made the med team get her real clothes.

He takes her two levels lower, past three levels more of the restricted zone, and through one very thorough decontamination chamber. His hand remains at her back throughout, under his jacket, but over her top. She starts shivering from the next set of doors, like she can sense where this is going.

“Almost there,” he says, as if it’s supposed to reassure her.

Grace winces. His jacket is too big on her, and he pulls it up, and zips it for her. She clutches his hand, holds it like it’s her only lifeline. Probably won’t be feeling that way by the time this is done.

At the very end of their walk is a medium sized, reinforced room. Not too big to hide in, but not too small for movement either. He keys in the passcode, squeezes her hand, and leads her in. On the other end is glass, but on either side of the room are two thick panels, sealed for now. White all around. There are three cameras, and eyes on the other side of the glass. This is not how the suits wanted it to go. They wanted the girl tied and wired to as many monitoring devices as possible. They wanted her isolated, and tested, but this, Leon had thought, and said, and fought for, would be kinder. And possibly faster in showing results.

He doesn’t want to see her all tied up and pleading again. Not under these circumstances, not unless he’s the one doing it.

When the door to the left opens, Grace jumps. Whatever senses she has when it comes to infected things (and yes, it’s definitely only infected according to her files), was successfully sponged by the door. The low groan of former officer Norman Cole comes in before he does. He used to be a good man, a good officer. Had two kids, widowed. He was working the scene in Wrenwood Hotel when Grace went missing. Might have even talked to her for all Leon knows.

Now half his face is gone, one eye exploded in his socket, a fire poker was shoved in through and through when the DSO had picked him up from the hotel two years ago. He’s even more decomposed now, dropping pieces of flesh as he lumbers around, confused at first. They’ve put a small cocktail of blockers in him for the purposes of this experiment.

Grace digs her fingers into Leon, sharp, with purpose. A breath away from drawing blood.

“L-Leon?” she whispers, and fuck, something about the way she says his name, all wobbly, and trusting but also fearful makes him wonder what it would be like to have that stutter around his cock.

A wild, stray thought. Invasive, like wanting to jump off a tall building just because you’re too close to the edge. Might be he’s been spending too much time with her, might be he’s not had a good fuck since the infection showed up in his body, might be that her whole shy, apple-cheeked, nerdy glasses thing is charming. Or might be that Leon’s a sick fuck who’d like to push the blind, traumatised girl around just to see how well she screams his name.

Possibly the last one. But he doesn’t really intend to find out. He has a job to do.

He brings his hand to the small of her back, and gives her a push towards the lumbering, drugged out zombie.

“I read your files last night,” he tells her. They could be anywhere else, the way he says it. Out by the side of the road, people-watching. Or in his car, and he’s taking her home. He leans against the wall, hands in his pockets.

“S-So?”

He looks at the former Norman Cole pointedly. “We’ll start easy,” he says. “Tell our friend here to take three steps to the left.”

“W-What?” Grace takes a step back. “I c-can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can.”

Grace shakes her head frantically. “T-They tried to—I tried. It doesn’t work. E-Elpis doesn’t work!”

He tilts his head. “Alright.” He shoves himself off the wall, walks towards Cole with slow precision. “Plan B then.”

Cole snarls when Leon gets close enough. Yellowed teeth, half fallen off, and thick saliva dripping down its chin. It wails and reaches for Leon, which is easy enough to dodge. Leon grabs it by the back of its head and marches it towards Grace.

She scrambles back until her back hits the wall with a small thump. The girl has very little weight on her. He should ask the docs to add more protein in her diet.

“W-What are y-you—”

Cole snarls and struggles, but as he brings it close to Grace, Cole doesn’t bother reaching for her. Instead the stupid thing fights to reach around over to Leon.

He lets go and allows Cole to come close enough for Leon to smell his breath. He winces, regretting it immediately. He pivots, gets his hatchet out, kicks out the legs from under the dead thing, and kicks the body that used to be a man until it’s on the floor. It takes four, good, full body hacks to sever the hands off of the guy. Two more to render the legs useless. Leon picks up the zombie by the hair, and pulls it back towards Grace but its snarling mouth immediately snaps shut an inch away from her face. It goes quiet, drool still running down its face.

Grace is shaking, eyes on him, instead of the zombie breathing down her neck. She looks all wide-eyed, and hurt. Like he hurt her. He yanks her hand up and places it against Cole’s mouth. Grace screams, and struggles, but Cole doesn’t move, doesn’t bite.

“What were you saying?” he asks her.

“T-This isn’t m-me,” she says. Lies, he thinks. “I’m not doing a-anything. I don’t know what you r-read in those files b-but I c-can’t—”

“Okay.” He yanks Cole away and watches Grace sink down a bit. He smiles and brings the snarling head up again, and places his left arm near its face. Howling, screeching, and violent, harsh snapping teeth. Close enough. Dangerous, beautiful. That edge of the building. Forty floors down, and then splat. Him.

“W-What are you—Leon?” She looks suddenly more afraid than he’s seen her. Ah, it seems he’s found the button.

He shakes the zombie head, sways it around his arm. “Tell it to stop.” He pulls the head close, then back in time before the teeth can snap around him.

“I-It doesn’t work!” she says. Voice now pleading. “I-I’ve tried. Please. I can’t. It doesn’t w-work!”

She’s getting more worked up now. Hasn’t even considered that he might be bluffing, which, for the record, he isn’t. He’s already infected so there’s nothing more to do there, and Cole was shot with one of Gideon’s designer drugs. DSO has it in good faith (and some experimentation) that Cole can’t infect anyone else with his bite.

Will hurt like a bitch, but won’t be anything a med-injector or two can’t fix. Anything for the cause, Leon tells himself, and the upper brass.

“Please,” Grace is begging. But begging is not what he wants. Not now. Not yet.

“You can make it stop,” he tells her. “Make him stop.”

“I can’t! Please, please, L-Leon. You have to believe me.”

Maybe she isn’t lying. But he can’t know for sure until he dials up the pressure. Under the right conditions, the file had said. He throws down Cole’s useless head on the ground, stomps on it hard enough to crack it.

“Okay,” he tells her. Consoles. “Okay.”

He steps towards her, hands reaching for her and she reaches back with so much trust. She looks ready to sob. He walks them back to the door they came from and knocks with drama.

No one answers back. The door remains closed. He raps it again with more urgency.

“Wrap it up,” he says. “That’s enough.”

Silence. Grace shifts uncomfortably around him. “W-What’s wrong?”

The siren goes off just on time. He looks up in perfect bewilderment. Practiced scrunch of his brows. The panels on both side of the room slide open, the lights around them turn a deep, alarming red, and from within the darkness, the infected file into the room, slow, steady, a veritable torrent.

Grace can’t see but she’ll know that the numbers are bad.

He bangs on the door again, just for her sake. Gotta put on a good show.

“Leon?” The way she says his name should be studied. Not what she can do with Elpis running in her bloodstream. That shit’s beginning to bore him, but the way she says his name. The roll of the two syllables around that pink tongue of hers. Fucking hell.

He wonders, as the hoard of zombies close in around him (they genuinely don’t care about Grace), if it’s the age thing that’s setting him off. He’s always been an asshole. A freak. A degenerate. Must be the idea of a pretty, young, absolutely vulnerable thing that’s making him all horny like this. Something about the innocence too. Yeah, definitely that as well.

He makes a show of getting overwhelmed. Hacks away as much as he can to make sure he doesn’t actually die here, but is sloppy enough to keep up the act. His view of her keeps getting obstructed but from a glimpse she looks sufficiently frightened. He doesn’t know if he wants Elpis to really work or not. What would it mean for her if it doesn’t? If she’s just some broken doll that can see without her eyes?

Would the DSO let her go? Would they sign off on his request to take her home? Possibly, but they’ll always want to keep an eye on Grace, and run more experiments—the ugly kind. They never did let Sherry go. Not truly, and Grace is a much tastier morsel. Too delectable to resist, he thinks.

The coughing fit gets him out of nowhere. He hadn’t even taken a hit but he drops to the ground with the force of his body deciding to betray him. He feels the hot gurgle of blood up his throat and splatter against the floor. The room sways, moves like the swirl of milk against his morning coffee. Sounds disappear, then return in a muffle. Tinnitus in his ears, then, getting louder and louder, while screams and moans come to him from behind a sponge. Somewhere in there he recognises the sound of Grace’s pleading. From that three minute video, he thinks. Just like it.

He sees the teeth come at him from the right, knows that they’ll get him, knows it, accepts it, almost feels it. Feels the air around him swish, then snap. He hears her in his head before he hears her properly, with his ears.

“STOP. PLEASE STOP.”

Everything in the room freezes. As if the air itself was asked not to move. The word burns through his skull, makes him drop his gun, makes all the infected around him collapse down on the floor. Then, nothing. No movement. They stop. They all stop.

The lights turn back on. The wailing of the siren is shut off. The door behind Grace opens, and two of the security agents come in and drag her out while Leon just stands in place. Frozen, while her voice still keeps rising around his skull.

*

She’s in the straitjacket again when he unlocks himself from the scene of his crimes to come find her. She’s been crying. The med staff have left her on her bed, and when he approaches she shrieks.

“D-Don’t touch me!” She shuffles back. Or, tries to.

He frowns. “You wanna stay in that thing?”

She's hiccupping, like she can't get enough air. Eyes downcast. He doesn’t understand Grace Ashcroft. She wasn’t in any real danger. She must know that. He saw the CCTV footage of the care centre from the day of his infiltration. When the infected breached the room she was in, they tore through everyone in the room except her. Didn’t even bother coming close to her. Now the question was whether they considered her one of them, or if she controlled them into leaving her alone.

He approaches her slowly like a wounded animal and he’s always been nothing but a predator, maw dripping in blood. He’s kind about taking the straps off her, and disentangling the sleeves around her body. He doesn’t linger, doesn’t touch her any more than he needs to but she shakes and shivers like a deer caught under the jaw of a rabid beast.

She runs off to the corner of the room just as soon as she’s free.

“I-I trusted you!”

Fool, he wants to say. He wants to bite it into her skin to make a statement. Instead he says, “You weren’t in danger.”

“I don’t care about that!” she yells. It’s the first time he’s heard her raise her voice.

“What’s the problem, then?”

“You g-gave up!” she says. “I saw you. I saw—you would have let them bite you. You weren’t even trying to—”

He shrugs. “So?”

“SO, you were going to make me watch. You were going to let them tear you up and make me watch!” Like her mother, he knows. He had always known, but didn’t really want to think about that too hard. The right pressure points, and all he can hear ringing in his head is her sweet little voice saying that he’s all she has.

“You stopped them, though,” he tells her.

She shakes her head. “I didn’t know. I-I didn’t know I-I could do that. It’s never worked, before, when Victor made me try.”

She didn’t have anything to lose back then. Fuck them both that it has to be him now. A dying, broken, old dog.

“I-I can’t do this,” she says. “I can’t do it a-again. I won’t.”

He catches her before her fingertips can touch his gun. He holds her by the hair and pulls her back. She struggles but it’s not that difficult for him to restrain her. He makes sure to cradle her head so that it doesn’t slam against the wall as he pins her.

“This is getting old,” he tells her.

“I have nothing,” she tells him. “I have n-nothing.”

And no one. Except him, and he’s a dying man anyway, and she must know that. He knows she can feel his infection, throbbing in his veins, rotting him from the inside. He notices now that she has a small trickle of blood on the corner of her mouth. Was it Elpis taking too much from her, or did she bite her lip hard enough to draw blood?

“You really wanna die?” he says. An observation. He takes the gun out of its holster and places it delicately against her chin. She nods, a little desperately. He brings it lower, glides it down, down, down against her, past her throat, past the valley of her breasts, past the smooth planes of her stomach and rests it against the waistband of her pants.

He pauses there for a moment, to make her think that no, he won’t go there before he pushes against the taut strings and finally brings the cold metal tip at a rest against her clothed cunt.

“You have to earn it.” he tells her.

She swallows a gasp between her teeth. He watches her eyes widen, hands shake under his grasp, and that wet mouth of hers open. A wince next as he pushes the gun closer to her clit.

He thinks of everything that Ada taught him, all those years on her leash and he thinks yeah, he gets it now. Grace is already so broken, and it would be so easy to break her some more. She’ll behave, he knows, for him, if he asks, if he plays this right.

And hopefully he’ll die before he catches any real feelings.

Yeah, yeah. It’s not the best course of action, but it will be the easiest. Whatever the fallout, he won’t be around to deal with it. Not his circus, not his rabbit.

“Please,” she begs. For death, but instead he bends down and kisses her.

He tries to be soft. For her. But he has a gun pressed to her, and her tongue ignites his very bones. He licks off her blood, swallows, comes back for more. She’s sweeter than he imagined. All soft skin, and inexperienced swipes of her tongue as if she’s never been kissed before. He wants to bite down, bite so hard into her it leaves a mark long after he’s gone, just sink into her and stay there, growl if anyone tries to pry him off.

“I’ll consider it,” he tells her against her lips. “Still have a few weeks left before the infection takes over. You should stick around till then.”

She nods, or tries to but his hand is still around her neck. “If you behave,” he continues. “Maybe we can both get what we want.”

He removes the gun, removes his hands, and takes an unsteady step back. She remains by the wall and he admires the shaken, red form of her there for a moment before turning around and leaving.

“See you tomorrow,” he says by the door.

It’s only in the morning, the next day, after a long, hot shower, that Leon sees his reflection in the foggy mirror and realises that the infection has crawled away from his face, and back down his shoulders where it was before, two weeks ago.

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.”

Chapter Text

He’s gone off and grown a stupid fucking conscious it seems.

He did what needed to be done. The quickest, best way in an already messy situation, and now he feels bad about it. This isn’t like him. He doesn’t care about these things, only about getting the job done, not the methods. That’s what makes him so good. Best soldier in the game. All the medals to him.

But there’s something about Grace Ashcroft—her starlight milky eyes, the tremble of her lip, the quiet hush of her voice—that sets him off. Makes him all slow in the head. Makes his senses disappear. Makes him feel like he’s a twenty-one year old rookie cop showing up to his first day on the job, dick in hand, and too much empathy to flood the room.

If she wasn’t such a fucking liar, or at least if she was a good one, things could be different. Leon has a board of directors breathing down his neck, thumb right up his asshole snipping at him to strap the girl in a bed and throw the scientists at her. They’ll make sure they get all the answers whether she sings or not. Zendik, loudest and most nasal of them all, had gone as far as to declare he and his team could extract an anti-viral for RCS, and other Umbrella viruses if given free rein over Grace. Wouldn’t that be great? A cure. Right there, under their noses, sleeping comfortably wrapped in his jacket.

You would think the man would know his place after Leon shot his knee out, but no. He was still chattering from his hospital bed, trying to call up the board right until they took him into surgery, and now Leon has a problem.

Well, two problems. One of which is trying to befriend the other.

Sherry’s taken too much of a liking to Grace for Leon’s comfort. He needs to snip this in the bud as soon as possible.

“She’s fine,” he tells her over the phone. “She’s sleeping it off. You don’t need to be here.”

“Tough luck,” Sherry says. “Already on my way.”

She hangs up and he curses into the empty air. He just wants some fucking rest. He wants to take a nice, long, hot shower, wipe off the gore and grime, start a load of laundry, and hang back with a nice glass of whiskey and watch something on the TV. Now, he has to entertain Sherry, and also probably explain why Grace is on his bed, when he has a perfectly good guest room right next to his.

He doesn’t fucking know and he doesn’t want to think about it.

She fell asleep in the car again. Grace is far too trusting. He should teach her about not letting her guard down around people like him. Especially him. So far gone and comfortable that she had moved closer when he picked her up. He let her keep his jacket over the thin white hospital clothes they had her in, carried her from the car across the threshold of his house, to his room and put her on his bed. And through all of it, she had slept.

Too fucking easy to kidnap, he had realised. Too tasty. No wonder Zendik tried to shoot his shot. Leon would have too. Leon had, in fact.

Some strange madness had taken over him. He'd only wanted to scare her. Get her frightened and emotional enough to blurt out her secrets or accidentally set them off. He was never going to go past the waistband. At most he would have run a finger over the edge and then backed off if she still had nothing to say.

It was just—it was just so easy to slip his hand in. She was right there. Under him. All soft and petite and blind. The halo of her white hair was blinding, dulling his senses and scrambling his brain into mush. And more than anything, she had been wet. Weeping like a pretty siren come to ruin his life. He does it without thinking. Almost as if his hand moves on its own and the next thing he knows is that he has a finger inside Grace’s gorgeously tight pussy.

He turns into an animal in rut. A wild thing made only of lust and greed. She was so beautiful under him. Flushed, gasping, clutching his shirt like it’s the only tether she has. Her mouth was divine—all pink and swollen and wet.

She had come up and kissed him. Wanted him, and his finger violating her. Under normal circumstances, if he was going to touch her, he would have done it slow. Drawn out and maddening. Would have her squirming and begging. He would have made her far more wet than she had been. Made sure that she was a veritable fountain and when he would have finally caved and moved inside her, he would have gone slow then too.

She was too fucking tight to have done this before. It’s everything he’s read about her life, and being around the nervous mess of her, and the obvious inexperience of her touch that makes him think she’s probably a virgin.

A virgin he shoved his finger up, right down to the knuckle without enough prep or warning. Hell is not enough for the likes of him.

The problem is that she had moaned, and kissed him. Why the fuck did she have to kiss him?

She should have kicked him, bitten him, slit his throat. Mutilated his corpse, and then taken a piss on it after.

He pours himself some of the good whiskey. He really needs it today. He gulps it down, relishing in the burn, trying to make his head clear. He feels like a fool around Grace. And soon enough his body betrays him again, feet leading straight up to her.

She looks all sweet and serene in sleep. The clothes she had on at her ward at the DSO had been ruined. Cut up and bloodied in the skirmish. One of the medics who wasn’t under questioning had given him a large white hospital gown for her. Sherry had helped Grace wrap it around herself. It was for someone almost four sizes larger than her and even after being wrapped up almost like a dress, hung off her edges, sweeping onto the floor. He’d almost tripped over it bringing her inside the house.

Now it’s rucked up, almost to her ass, her smooth, supple legs out for the whole world to see. Leon makes sure the blinds are closed properly before walking up to the bed, drink in hand, and taking a seat next to Grace’s sleeping form.

She’s a cute little thing. Crazy as fuck, but cute. Especially like this. Especially with his jacket around her.

He eyes those legs. Creamy, soft. What would it be like to have them around his shoulders, he wonders. Around his neck like a vice, choking him out as he feasts on her? The hand not holding the glass finds itself against her skin. So fucking soft. Warm like sunlight. They hold no trace of what Gideon did to her. There was a video. Log #168, where the fucker had cut her all the way to the bone while she had screamed herself hoarse and passed out eventually, three minutes forty two seconds later (he counted).

He takes a good mouthful of his drink. Lets the burn hold him in the present where her skin is unblemished. She healed up eventually, slowly, after many hours of flickering between awareness and unconsciousness. Another little morsel she had left out about her abilities. It’s a good thing he likes her enough not to make a fuss about it.

He had given her the med injector back at HQ knowing she didn’t need it, knowing it would dull her down for him a bit.

The Wolves came to him a day ago with news about Victor Gideon. Bastard's still in the wind, but there are traces. They’re investigating all his known properties, and there’s one near Michigan that seems promising. When Leon finds Gideon, and he will, he’ll cut him mouth to anus. He’s already picked out the knife for the job. He intends to make it as slow, and gruelling as possible. Peel away his flesh from bone and watch if it stitches itself back, and if it does, rinse and repeat until he’s bored.

He wonders if Grace would want a little fun for herself as well. If he had her powers, he’d make Gideon saw his own dick off and eat it piece by piece. Chew properly and swallow. Don’t fucking spit. He’ll ask her. Later.

Leon removes his hand from her, resists the urge to kiss the leg that Gideon hurt. The last time he had found Grace like this, asleep and holding on to his jacket like a lifeline, he had taken a sleeve and carefully placed it between the cradle of her thighs, inside her pants, trying not to brush his fingers against her soft pussy. He didn’t stay back to catch her reaction when she woke up. She’d seemed sufficiently embarrassed the next day, and he’d patted himself on the back.

He doesn’t try the same thing again. Not because he wants to shove his hand back down between her legs, no. Not at all. He has no need to repeat the same tricks again.

He takes the blanket and covers her, legs and all, with it. She snuggles in, makes a hushed noise, little pink mouth open just a bit. Just enough to haunt him. His fingers find her hair, hover just close enough, tucks a strand away from her face and resists the urge to kiss her mouth.

She’s gone and trauma-bonded to him like some newly hatched chick but what the fuck is his excuse? Yes, she’s a hot, young thing. Yes, he’s a depraved old man. But it’s such a cliche, you would think he’s above all that. He could find the same story again and again in thousands and thousands of police reports. He can almost read his signed confession on how he finger fucked a traumatised, drugged-out girl who was foolish enough to trust him. Verdict: guilty. Sentence: death.

He hears his name on her lips. The echo of it, the memory of her under him, moving against his hand, fucking herself as much as he’s fucking her. The syllables of his name stretched out in her moan. The beginning a stutter, and the ending a gasp as his finger finds a spot that makes her sing.

He leaves her, leaves this silly little dream of the past when he hears the sound of a car outside. Downs the rest of his whiskey and opens the door for Sherry before she can ring the bell and wake Grace up.

*

“You didn’t put the collar on her,” Sherry says.

Leon grunts, and looks away. If he keeps his eyes on Grace, he’ll be imagining her in an actual collar and he doesn’t want to pop a boner in front of Sherry.

“She’s sleeping,” he says.

“Better get it done soon. The board is already antsy about removing her from HQ. Plus all the mess we made.”

“Board can go fuck itself,” Leon grunts. It's something Sherry's said so many times before and he had never agreed. He's always been such a good pet. What's changed now?

Rabies, probably.

Sherry’s mouth curves to the side. He should have locked her out, shut all the curtains and pretended not to be home. “Leon S. Kennedy. Protector of the weak.”

She says it sweetly enough, but something about the words, and how it’s of course such a fucking lie, and how Ada had said the same thing to him once upon a time, too long ago that grates at him. Prickles him right down to the bones.

“Best to do it when she wakes up,” is all he says. He doesn’t want to fight. He deserves the snide remark. Grace really could use a protector but he’s not the guy. In fact, she needs one from him and his sickening, coiling desire for her.

Leon knows he’s not capable of any true affection. Whatever goodness he had was carved out a long time ago, and now he’s nothing but a creature of greed. He doesn’t care for Grace. He hungers.

Sherry looks at him, thinks of saying something. He can tell from the way her mouth moves, and then stops when she rethinks it and wisely keeps her mouth shut. Instead she hands him a large paper bag of clothes. "For her. Had to guess the size but I think most of these will fit."

Grace mumbles in her sleep, shifts around, curls into a fetal position and starts to let out the softest snores that sends Leon clutching at the doorway harder than he was.

Fuck, he needs another drink.

*

He wakes up to her screaming.

Sweaty, delirious, and struggling against the blankets. Leon rushes for her, holding her hands down first because she’s starting to scratch herself out. Her sobs are large, heaving, like she can’t find air beyond the pain. Is it one of the dreams where Gideon is choking her out? He used to do that, she’d told Leon once. Every time the results of a test did not turn out favourably, or if Grace tried to fight or escape.

He holds her by the neck, pushes his weight against her. It works every time. Letting the dream of unwanted hands on her being replaced by the reality of his. She feels tiny in times like this. He can envelope her whole body so easily, press her down, mark that pale, pale skin. He feels the urge to bite, but he only hovers.

“Hey, hey, Grace,” he’s whispering, so close to her, she could reach up and tear his face off. “It’s okay. You’re okay. I got you. I’ve got you.”

Her eyes snap open, and though they see nothing, she stills. She bites her lips, tries to muffle her sobs. When he lets go of her, she reaches for him immediately, like he’s a lifeline. Her arms wrap around him, face pressed to his neck. He feels hot, wet tears, the tremble of her lips. He lifts her up, pulls her close, as close as she can be, as close as she will allow, and arranges them so that he’s pressed against the headboard and she’s contained safely in the cradle of his arms.

“Gideon again?” he asks, when she’s calmed down a bit.

She nods, face still hidden in his chest. What must it have been this time? Log#34? #755? #108? Some rotten hellish nightmare of them all?

She mumbles something but he doesn’t catch it.

“What was that?”

“H-He was hurting you,” she says. Her words slur a little, from sleep, from fear, from the crying. “He made me w-w-watch.”

He rubs her back. Up and down, soothing motions. “I’m right here.”

Her hands tighten. He feels the sting of nails but he doesn’t want to discourage this.

In Log#565, which was just overnight post-operation monitoring, she had woken up screaming from some nightmare, found herself tied to the bed, unable to move. She’d struggled to curl up into a fetal position and then eventually given up, sobbing and heaving until she eventually passed out.

He holds her as gently as his ruined hands possibly can. Rubs her back, whispers quiet nonsense to her. Reassurances that mean nothing but she calms. Sobs, but calms.

“Tell me about before,” he says.

“W-What?”

“Before Gideon. Tell me about that.”

There didn’t seem to be much to tell there. Her files said that she was always at work, didn’t have any friends, or close companions. Was shit at safety too judging by all the photos they had of her all the way from her teenage years when her mother had been alive to years later as a grown woman, an FBI analyst with zero awareness that she was being stalked and photographed.

Grace shifts in his arms, gets a little more comfortable. He feels her eyelashes against his neck, feels a shiver at the soft butterfly tickle of them.

He wonders if there was some secret boyfriend who slipped out of the surveillance cracks. Some soft punk out there wondering where the sweet young girl he was seeing disappeared off to. Will some twenty-something pretty boy come looking for her and find a grizzled mangy dog barring his way? Leon will maul him. Snap him limb from limb and bring a bone back for Grace as a gift. Kiss her fiercely with blood dripping from his mouth.

“I-I was investigating the W-W-Wrenwood—” Grace starts.

“No,” his voice is sharp. She flinches, and he has to buff out the edges when he continues. “Not about work. Tell me about you.”

She mulls it over. Fingers clenching and unclenching on his shirt like a cat kneading for comfort.

“There isn’t anything,” she mumbles. “I woke up, I went to w-work, I came back home.”

“You did more work, at home, didn’t you?” he sighs.

She bites her lip. “Um, a-a little.” The soft scratching of nails on his chest. “I-I was also trying to Platinum Elden Ring.”

He blinks. Tries to decode the gibberish that just came out of her mouth. She’s too young to have a stroke so he doesn’t jump in alarm. “Did you?” he asks instead.

She shakes her head. “I almost had it. Bet there’s probably a new game out by now.”

Oh. Video games. She’s into video games. He grasps at this information with strange satisfaction. To know something about her that no one else probably knows, like how she had plants in her apartment. Lots and lots of them, of different varieties, and all over the house. Like the way she prefers soft serves over proper ice cream. Like the way she sighs when he says her name, the way she flutters against his—

Fuck.

“Haven’t played a video game since…” he sighs. Thinks long and hard about it. “Don’t remember actually.”

She smiles into him. “You should play Elden Ring. You would be a good souls player. You’re like one in real life.”

More gibberish but he thinks she’s trying to give him a compliment so he just grunts in response. Lets the feeling of her soft skin against his ruin his whole brain.

“I’ll consider it.”

She mumbles her acquiescence. So sweet, like caramel running down his throat. Maybe he should get a console for her and she can beat his ass in Street Fighter or something. That might get her to leave the bed.

His other tricks aren’t working. She’s become so used to confinement that she doesn’t know what to do with freedom. It’s not even real freedom yet and she’s shying away. It’s been two days since he brought her home and the one time he tried to walk her out the threshold with him she panicked and scratched him.

He’s not even put the collar on her yet. Can’t imagine what she’ll do when he inevitably has to. Will she claw at him, scratch, hiss? Will she bite the hand that fingered her?

The thought is lovely. He likes a little fight, and yeah he could sure as fuck just drag her out against her will but strangely enough he doesn’t want to.

He’s also been at work most of the last two days cleaning up the mess that Zandik started. There’s a leak, he knows, somewhere in the upper ranks, or directly in the board itself. Chris and Sherry are taking point on that. Leon has Elpis to handle.

And Elpis has gone back to sleep. Leon sighs, arranges both himself and her into a more comfortable position and closes his eyes. Turns out he doesn’t get nightmares like this either.

*

The order comes in on Tuesday. Early morning, 5am. He wakes up to the shrill ring on his phone, picks up before it can wake up Grace too.

“Kennedy,” It’s Hunnigan. “It’s time. Bring the asset.”

He grunts. Sits up, joints creaking, a dull pain on his left shoulder. “She’s not ready yet.”

A heavy sigh. “Tough. Put the collar on her, and bring her to HQ. Debrief is in thirty.”

The call disconnects and Leon swears, resisting the urge to throw his phone and break something. It’s a whole skill to extract himself from Grace. She’s a boa constrictor in her sleep. It’s become a habit for him to sleep beside her. Two different blankets, clothes on, no funny business. It’s because she has too frequent nightmares and he can hear the screaming from the other room so it’s just easier to be able to roll over, reach for her blindly and pull her to himself until she calms down. Saves them both the trouble of actually waking up. Better for his sleep cycle. He’s old, and it's tough to go back to sleep once he wakes up.

He pads over to the kitchen, pours himself a bourbon. Neat. Gulps it, and pours another, then a third, and because the anger and frustration doesn’t fucking leave him, he smashes the glass against the wall.

Then, he proceeds to make a fourth glass, and a cup of tea for Grace.

One spoon of sugar for her, two cubes of ice for him. He grabs a coaster, and places her drink on the bedside table. Ada was so fucking anal about water rings on the nice wooden furniture that it comes as a habit to him now.

All it takes is his hand on her head to wake her up. Wide, sleepy eyes. Open mouth. She blinks up at him curiously. His hand twitches but he removes it from her, waits for her to sit up, and motions towards the tea. He knows she can still see. Knows she left some of that rot in him. Deliberately maybe, selfishly. Or maybe she really has no control like she keeps insisting.

He doesn’t mind. He feels healed enough, and there’s something sickly satisfying about being her eyes.

He takes a seat on the other side of the room, by the window on an armchair that had come with the house. Feels like a cuck watching her lick the rim of the teacup.

On the desk next to his chair is the collar, still in its box. He was supposed to have done this immediately. Every day he shows up to work, he hears about it. He looks down at his own collar. Compact, non-invasive as one can get with these things. He’s seen Grace eye it with her sightless eyes. Knows what conclusions she’s jumped to, and there’s some bitter satisfaction in that too. He wants her to feel dirty and disgusted with this want that he feels too. She's also right, in a way.

In less than thirty minutes Hunnigan will call him again, asking where the fuck is he. He has—he looks at his watch—nineteen minutes. Fuck.

“Grace,” he says. His voice is rougher than he would like it to be.

His plan was to let her get used to his house first. Let her start feeling like a real person perhaps. Then, he would have started introducing a few people she can get comfortable with. Trusted ones who wouldn’t do anything he wouldn’t want them to. He was going to take her on a night drive, have a soft serve, show her the moon over the water. He was going to take her for a walk in the park in the daylight. Remind her what the sun feels like. He also thought about getting her a service dog, but then she can see through him, so why would she need anyone else?

“Got a call a few minutes ago.” The words taste ugly in his mouth. “We’re being…summoned.”

Her eyebrows scrunch together. Mouth twists into adorable confusion. “We?”

He grips the glass, wishes he could throw it too but that would startle her. “Yeah,” he says, words sticking in his throat, and he has to claw them out with a crowbar. “Vacation’s over, sweetheart.”

*

He puts the collar on. She lets him without complaint. No biting, no scratches, only the tremble of her mouth.

He had asked for the bracelet, but they couldn’t do that. The compact ones are for staff only. For the likes of Leon and Sherry who don’t need as much monitoring, but dangerous enough to be kept on a leash. Grace, on the other hand, is a specimen. Ideally, she should be in containment. And they have so many things they need to monitor when it comes to her. Everything, in fact.

The band is thin, almost like a pretty piece of jewellery. None of those thick neck monitors they put on the infected they keep under hold. This one’s a little more advanced too. Monitors brain activity, heart rate, glucose levels, hormones, blood sugar, and T-virus activity amongst so many other things. He puts it on like he would a necklace for a lover, but she makes a sad, uncomfortable noise when the click of the clasp echoes into the room.

“Shh,” he mumbles into her ear. Holds her steady, a hand on her back. “It’s okay.” It’s not.

He waits for the collar to power up, then starts the process of syncing it with his phone. He wonders if she’ll start hating him now. It will seep in eventually, if not immediately, he knows. Poison in her brain, a collar on her neck. Good dog. Are the DSO any better just because they're not cutting her flesh to bone? Is he?

As far as Leon can tell from the videos of her time in Rhodes Hill, Victor Gideon did not rape her. Leon, however—

“L-Leon?” her voice is watery. Seconds from crying. Grace looks like she has a lot to say but her trembling mouth stays close. He’s seated on the bed with her, already dressed for work. She’s not yet. The clothes Sherry left for her weren't for field missions. He’ll have to get something for her later, but for now they’ll have to do with a t-shirt and the heaviest duty bulletproof vest he can find in her size at HQ.

“I’ll be with you,” he tries to say as calmly as he can. “It’ll probably be a quick one, too. Not too dangerous. We don’t want to lose our best potential asset on her first day.”

She doesn’t nod. Doesn’t say anything in acknowledgement. Just clutches onto him tighter.

When his phone beeps, letting him know the sync is complete, he gets up, and holds out a hand for her. She didn’t drink all of her tea. He didn’t finish that last glass of bourbon. They don’t have time for breakfast.

He has her change into jeans and a thicker t-shirt. Takes her by her hand to the couch where he crouches beside her to put on her shoes. Red canvas ones that will stick out from far away he notes unhappily. They’ll need combat boots for the next time. Sherry really only went for the casual wardrobe. Fuck both of them.

“Let’s go,” he says, and he can tell she tries not to cry.

Her eyes are blurry, the way they get when she’s seeing though someone else. He tries not to look at the watch. Tries being patient for her, but he can tell she won’t be getting up on her own.

“Grace.”

She shakes her head.

“Grace.”

He pulls. She resists. Fuck.

“Please,” she says. Voice shaky and desperate. Pins and needles on his chest. A whole fucking boulder down his throat. “Leon, I-I can't.”

"No," he says, frowning, "you don't want to."

"I can't!" she insists.

He already knows he’ll burn in hell so he grabs her by her fragile wrist and yanks. She struggles as well as a hundred and ten pound girl can against the likes of him. Her feet skid against the floor, her nails bite into his skin and she screams, thin, reedy like she didn't expect she'd have to. Shaky and uncertain, but loud.

He pulls her to himself, hoists her up by the waist, and takes her to the front door kicking and screaming. She grabs his arm, squirms loose enough to reach him and bite. He doesn’t flinch, just holds her tighter and keeps walking.

In the end, it’s the begging that’s his undoing.

“P-Please, please don’t do this. L-L-Leon, Leon please.”

It’s a mix of how she says it, and how she’d said the same thing in almost all the logs of her torture. It’s the way she says his name, and how it was Victor in the videos. It’s in the way Gideon had laughed and the way she had sobbed. The tear-chocked gasps. The stuttered breathing. The soft, wet noise of her begging.

He loosens his grip. Just a fraction. A mere nothing, in fact, but she takes it. She yanks herself free in seconds and she bolts. Back inside his house. Back to where she thinks safety is.

He doesn’t know how to tell her if she doesn’t do this, if they don’t do this he can’t keep her safe. He can’t keep her at all. If Leon can’t make her useful for the DSO then they’ll just take her back and find other uses for her.

He looks up at the sky, pink in dawn. Looks back to the house and sighs to himself. That went well, he thinks as he runs back after her.

He finds her on the floor, huddled against a wall in the living room. Couldn’t get far without his eyes. There’s a bruise on her knee. Must have knocked into his furniture, and the thought of it makes him unnecessarily angry.

She’s mumbling into her knees. He hears the words only when he’s stepped closer. Like chanting, like a prayer, she’s babbling everything, all the lies and songs and keywords she’d learned over the years under the scalpel of Victor Gideon.

“Please don’t do this. Please, I’ll be s-so good. I’ll b-behave. I’ll do a-anything. Anything you want.”

She repeats the words, over and over, like a password, a key, some forgotten magic spell. He doesn’t understand how easily she had left Rhodes Hill with him, how easily she had left the DSO HQ, but she won’t leave his house.

Is it the illusion of safety? Does she think this place is safe?

His phone starts ringing. Hunnigan. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Leon’s stomach drops as he realises that he’s run out of options. His fault, really. He got too soft with her, too nice. She thinks that he won’t hurt her, but all he’s been taught his whole life is how to hurt. He’s built for inflicting pain, not whatever Grace needs right now. This was the first time he tried being nice in a long while. For her. And now look, he’s gone and fucked up. Didn’t do it right because she’s grown attached to him, comfortable with him. She trusts him enough to defy him, and he can’t afford that. Neither of them can.

He gets a knife from the kitchen. The smallest one he can find because it’s the closest thing he has in the house to a scalpel.

It doesn’t make him happy to have to do this. But he’s a good monster. He barks when told, sits, rolls over, jumps. And right now he must bite.

He crouches down to her level. She flinches when his fingers touch her knee. Her wrist is already starting to bruise, and even though he knows it will heal faster than any normal person’s would, he hates that, hates himself, hates the DSO, and kind of hates her a little bit too.

“Grace,” he says. “We have to go. You don’t get to say no to this.”

She shakes her head. He sighs. Lets the knife scrape the floor near her. A warning. She stiffens immediately.

He looks down at the knife so she can look at it too.

“L-Leon?” she’s like a little lamb, ready for slaughter. Soft, trembling. He wants to tell her he won’t do it but for her own sake, he needs her to believe that he will. He brings the knife up, and she tries to scramble back, but there’s only a wall, and she’s nothing but cornered prey. The wolf salivates and holds the blade against her creamy, woolen throat. The blunt side of it but it makes no difference either to her or him. This is a betrayal and they both know it.

“I’m not your friend, Grace,” he says. “I’m your handler. And I have orders.”

She makes a soft, fearful noise. He watches the little flecks of trust she had crumble. Her affection shattering, turning sour under his knife. He’s no better than Gideon. In fact, he might be worse.

“Do you understand?” he asks.

Her crying makes his chest burn in a way he didn’t expect. “Grace?”

She nods.

“Get up.”

And yet she doesn’t.

“Do you want me to carry you?”

She nods again.

He sighs when she wraps her arms around his neck willingly. He holds her again with one hand, keeping one for the knife, and to lock the door behind him. She drowns her face in the crook of his neck, lips against his skin, her tears running down both of them, tickling him.

He realises that she’s actually never walked out of any building yet. He’s carried her every time. This was the one time he thoughtlessly dragged her out of and look where that got them.

When he dies, and they weigh his heart for his sins, it will be this look on Grace that Leon will remember. He will walk to tartarus himself, but for now he starts the car.

He doesn’t tell her the collar is equipped with a shock system, and he could have used it at any time. It’s too soon to let that worm out of the can.

Belatedly he thinks that fuck, bet she’ll never want to kiss him again now.

In some other, better, kinder world, they could have been friends. Played Elden Ring or whatever together. She could have helped him figure out how to keep his plants alive. Maybe if they had met under different circumstances, he could have persuaded her to leave the FBI and come work for him at the DSO. Would she still stutter in this world of never was? Would she even want to be friends with someone like him? Would she make the same noises when he puts his tongue on her?

In this could have been world, maybe they're closer in age. Maybe they run into each other somewhere mundane. Maybe they're introduced by friends. He's not a government dog, she's not a T-virus specimen. He asks her out for coffee. She says yes. Laughs at all his stupid jokes. Not the thin laugh she has now, but a real one. A full one. A laugh that hasn't known fear.

He looks at her now. The silver collar around her that he put there. The one that will make his phone buzz with her location wherever she is. She looks down at his, not that she can see it without him looking at the hand that held the knife to her. She's biting her lip to keep it from trembling, clutching her hands together between her knees but she shakes like a wet cat anyway.

He wants to say he's sorry, but he isn't. Just one of those things he has to do. It isn't personal. Means nothing. She means nothing as well. Another mission in a long line of endless ones.

I have nothing, she had yelled at him, another betrayal ago, under stark white lights.

Yeah, he thinks as she looks away first. She really has nothing. He killed the last thing she had.

Chapter Text

His hand is warm. Through all of it, all the noise, and buzz, and the hurt; it’s warm like the cup of tea he made for Grace that morning. Not cold like the way he speaks to Agent Hunnigan, not cold like the tip of his knife, or the muzzle of his gun.

He keeps swiping his thumb across the back of her hand, as if they’re in her glass room, and she’s being prepped for a blood test, not a field one. Maybe that’s what makes Grace ache more. That he’s back to acting all nice for her. As if he didn’t take her biggest fear and turn the blunt edge of it against her neck.

She wants to be angry at him but all she has is hurt and anger for herself. That she still likes him, that she still wants his hand on hers, and that it comforts her like nothing else, no one else. It makes her feel more pathetic, more stupid, more sick than she already thinks she is. Is there no line that he will cross that she will not immediately redraw at a different location, pretending he’s done nothing wrong?

But what does she have without him? Not even the promise of death, and really that’s all she wants. Him, and that gun of his that could blow her into smithereens. Better than a grenade even. She just had to bide her time, be good, bite her tongue and do all the things he and the DSO wanted her to do. Instead she disobeyed him. Got too comfortable in that house that wasn’t her home. Tried to think she’s a person and not a pet, and look what that got her. Didn’t Victor teach her what happens when she’s not good? How could she have let herself forget?

Grace feels herself slipping into a faraway place. Into the comfort of nothingness. It feels too heavy to be in the present. Too difficult to breathe without shattering herself so she lets herself slip quietly into a place beyond. She’s not here. She’s not anywhere. She’s not even alive. Not a real thing, no thoughts to be burdened with.

When Sherry comes by, the first thing she does is check on Grace. She looks at the bitten lip, the stillness of her, the stuttered movements, and the lifelessness. The marks he left on her wrists have faded already. Nothing to see here. Sherry frowns anyway, maybe says something to Grace but Grace can only blink back slowly. Sherry looks up at Leon, lips pressed. She hisses something at him, voice so faraway it makes Grace feel like she’s underwater.

“—what did you do?” Sherry’s lovely voice has acid Grace didn’t expect.

Leon turns away from Agent Hunnigan slowly, blinks at her like he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

“Did what I had to.” There’s something dull about him too. Like burning her might have singed him too. If Grace wasn’t elsewhere, she might have laughed.

Sherry scoffs. Agent Hunnigan looks between them, then hands over a thumb drive to Leon. “Wheels up in fifteen,” she says before leaving.

Leon’s hand tightens on Grace’s as Sherry starts raising her voice.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” she snarls. Grace watches the lines on her face with fascinated detachment, files away the timbre of her voice to analyze later.

“I–” Leon starts, pauses, looks away, down at the hand, her hand he’s holding. Grace notes the dullness of her fingernails. Fraying nail beds, chipped edges from her earlier struggle. His finger twitches. The one with the ring on it. “You know what happens otherwise.” A flex of his jaw. Unhappy gruff to his voice. Is that remorse? Does it matter? “I didn’t have a choice.” Leon hisses back.

Even underwater, even six feet under soil and buried emotions, when Sherry touches her elbow, Grace flinches.

“Sorry, sorry,” Sherry says immediately.

Leon’s hand tightens around hers, but Grace is too numb to squeeze back. The world is a swirl of water and light. Little pinpricks of shapes that sway in the wind. When Leon lets go, she doesn’t hold on. She’s not solid enough to be able to anyway. He walks away with Sherry, not too far, but Grace feels untethered. Left in the water and she was stupid enough to never learn how to swim. Her mother never taught her, and they moved around too much when she was young to have been sent out for any lessons. And then Grace liked drowning herself in work so much that swimming was never under consideration. Why bother?

Under the water it is peaceful. There are no doors here to walk out of, no sharp things, no real memories. Maybe she should have let Leon peel her like an orange. Just slipped into this feeling of nothingness while he took that knife and hacked her sanity away. Then, when she’s healed, she could have already forgiven him like the fool she is.

“—Miss Ashcroft?”

A voice in the water, somewhere in the darkness to the left. A wave crashes into Grace, and she’s pulled under. The voice fades in and out, like a blinking light, like fishes laughing, like—

“Are you okay? Do you—do you need anything?” It’s not someone she recognises. It’s a man. Young. Pleasant. No hard edges, no gravel, no venom that can burn her inside out.

Grace shakes her head. She can’t speak because if she opens her mouth she’ll burn her lungs with saltwater.

“Uh, oh. Okay.” The shuffling of feet. “I, uh, have this for you. Smallest size I could find in the armoury, but I think it should fit.”

Grace blinks back in the general direction of him in detached incomprehension.

“Oh, sorry. It’s—this is a vest. I was asked to find one for you.” A rustle, like he’s trying to hold something out to her. “Do you know how to put one on? Or, um, I can help you?”

He must be a new recruit. Sounds too green, too alive to have worked for the DSO that long. Too new to have his kindness pulled out and teeth grafted in the holes left behind.

Her mind sways along the current. She floats along like a leaf.

“Miss Ashcroft?”

Something touches her wrist. The same one Leon held between his fingers to drag her out into the open where there are no walls, no cover, no bed to hide under. Grace knows she bruises easy. Must have left a mark there like a bracelet. But it's healed now. She's healed now, right? The collar around her neck itches, tingles, burns.

The hand that is not Leon’s reaches for her elbow. Leather straps. Claws and knives digging in. There will be teeth next. The sharks have found her. There’s blood in the water—

She screams, tries to swim, tries to get away from the tangle of seaweed that wraps around her arm, pulling her under, into a vast blackness that you don’t come back from.

“L-Leon?” Her voice comes out strangled. He’s not her friend, he’d said, but it’s a knee-jerk reaction to call out to him. 

Footsteps, splashing, the glint of a gun, and suddenly she can see. Her eyes yank the young recruit by the collar and shove him against a wall.

“Hands off,” Leon growls at the poor boy who looks like he’s about to piss his pants.

He has short, red hair. Freckles like a sprinkle of paint against his face. He looks even younger than Grace, early twenties maybe. The fear in his round, brown eyes makes a strange sort of pleasure creep up on Grace. Something that’s half Leon, and half hers. Something she would never have felt before Rhodes Hill and Victor Gideon.

“I-I’m sorry. I was just trying to help her!” A pause, a gulp. “Sir.”

A hand tightens. The boy chokes for air.

Sherry steps in. “That’s enough, Leon.”

The waves lead her this way and that. Her eyes blink and let go of the rookie. She feels a squeeze in her chest, an ache that’s not hers, some rotten acidic feeling that she tries to move away from. But the water holds her, and she holds on to those eyes above ground.

Leon none too gently takes the bulletproof vest from the rookie and comes to her. He looks angry from Sherry’s eyes. Clenched jaw, ice-cold blue in his eyes. She wants to back up, wants to get away. Fear finds her under the water, and she doesn’t understand why. Leon won’t hurt her, even if he already did.

The ring, the knife, the hand that pulled her outside.

“Hey,” he says, making his voice all soft and low. None of the sharpness of his expression make it to her. “It’s okay.”

She wants to tell him no. She wants to tell him she hates him. She wants to scream. She wants to run.

But she has no mouth to open, no legs to run with. And even if she could, where would she go?

So she just nods.

*

It must be such a joke to have the blind girl become his eyes.

“Four to your left,” she says from her seat in the makeshift base. The chair is uncomfortable, if you can even call it a chair. It’s cold inside the tent, colder outside still. Leon was cruel enough to leave his jacket with her before heading off inside the facility. An abandoned Umbrella lab that was until recently being used by the same organisation that Leon tells her Victor's affiliated with.

The place looks hastily cleared out. As if they were warned at the last moment, and had only enough time to evacuate all personnel and let out a few infected specimens to act as a distraction for the DSO.

Leon has taken point, with a small squad with him, and left most of the soldiers with Grace. She doesn’t understand why. She won’t run. She has nowhere to run to. And underwater it doesn’t hurt as much.

She had momentarily forgotten what she is. What she’s supposed to be. For one laughable moment, she had thought she’s a person, but she hasn’t been one for over a year. Grace knows that now. Knows what happens when you let your guard down. Not your friend. She's never had one. Not even before. Why would she deserve one now?

The scrape of a knife, steel against her throat, and his hand that held it steady to her.

She’s a hundred different eyes, and each one she nudges towards the bright spot prowling the hallways. Every time he shoots one in the head, Grace imagines it’s her. Brains blown straight into the wall where the numbness is permanent and her pieces are scattered too far to be mended.

She’s lived a dozen small deaths by now. None of them hers, but oh they feel so good. The burn, the bloom, and then the explosion. Tissue that tears itself out from the force of his bullet. He is the last thing she sees every time, and it’s such a sweet death to have. Hurts her in a delicious way she can’t explain. Feelings that find her in her despite everything.

There are eighty three infected units in the facility left. She’s certain he won’t miss the twenty that she grabs hold of and redirects in a different direction, away from him, and towards a blind girl surrounded by unsuspecting soldiers.

“Three in the room ahead. And there are...different ones in the east lab.” A small part of her rises up from the water, skimming the surface to add, “B-Be careful. I can’t reach their minds. They’re c-closed off.”

Blind, crawling things. Long, sharp tongues, and such madness. There are some infections, some mutations she can’t fully reach. Ones that don’t answer her call because they speak a different language.

“Thanks,” Leon says. She holds the word in the palm of her hand and dives back beneath the surface where it’s cold and quiet.

He shoots out the infected that was her eyes in that moment and she sighs, out loud, in content. Grace jumps into a different infection, half her mind near Leon, and the other half to check up on the little group that’s coming her way. Will they tear her to pieces if she asks them? She'll have to find out before he does.

“Hey, um, hi.” The same cheery voice from before. The rookie. “I’m sorry about this morning.”

Grace doesn’t turn towards him. Her eyes are far away.

“I got you this,” he continues, and slides a paper cup of something towards her. “Careful, it’s hot.”

Grace takes a sip. It’s sweet, and for a moment she’s brought back up to the surface. It’s not hot. It’s warm. Makes her palms tingle with something pleasant.

“T-Thank you,” she mumbles down to her hands. Doesn’t see that it makes the boy smile all wide at her.

“I’m Tom, by the way. Morris.”

“G-Grace. Um, Ashcroft.”

The scrape of a chair. He takes a seat next to her. “Is this your first field mission?”

She hesitates for a second, then nods.

“Mine too.”

Grace feels a familiar gutteral, acidic feeling again. Blooming from Leon’s chest and seeping into hers. Even from far away, separated by walls and zombies, she knows it's him. She blinks into the room he’s in, into the body of a sole once-upon-a-woman in a tattered lab coat.

The boy next to her says something. It doesn’t matter.

Leon is on his hands and knees, above a long dead zombie. He lifts his hatchet and hacks at it. Again, again, again. He looks like he’s getting his upset out on the long dead flesh. Leon surges into the corpse, separates the spine from the body and slams all of it down again. He gets up, dipped in blood, angry, upset, hot all over like the world is ending.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. From her mouth, through the comms, as the dead woman she’s looking at him through steps closer. He turns but makes no move to hurt the body she’s in, knowing it’s her.

But he looks more pissed than he did when she disobeyed him, more than he did talking to Agent Hunnigan. He looks as mad as he was when he found her on the floor when the med staff went rogue.

Ugly, black fear finds her. She must have made a mistake. He must have found out. She drags herself up to the surface, trembling, aching. “S-S-Sorry,” she mumbles. Tries to say it louder for him but there’s water in her lungs. She scrambles to find the twenty infected she had set aside on her whims, sends them back into the facility, scattering, erasing her fingerprints. Another time, next time, she thinks. She needs to make it right for now. She needs to be good. She needs—

“Hey,” a gloved hand on the cheek that isn’t hers. He’s looking right at her. Speaking to her but it’s not her body, only a decayed imitation she’s pretending to be. A husk of someone else. But he’s looking at it and he’s seeing her. Grace Ashcroft, formerly FBI, pet to Victor Gideon. Who knows what she’s now. “Grace.”

There’s softness in the way he says her name. The way the syllable tumbles out of him. That maddening anger, that rotten burn is leaving him, melting down into the floor, tucked away to the side. Just feather-like things between them, and a T-virus infection that sustains it.

“Breathe, Grace,” he says. “You’re good. It’s all good. I’m not mad.”

She breathes, shakily, unsteadily. Swallows all the water down, coughs. “You w-were, though. F-Felt it.”

He curses. The hand against her cheek holds steady. He swipes a thumb close to the lips that are not hers. “Forgot about that,” he says. “I’m not mad at you.”

Then why? Who else is there? What else is he bothered with?

Maybe he’s wondering about his wife. Upset he’s here, stuck babysitting some lovesick girl, while the love of his life is tucked away in his real house, probably somewhere in DC.

She feels the tang of bile at the thought. Don’t think, don’t think. She dives into the water. She has to be good, so she nods—makes the body that isn’t hers nod. “O-Okay.”

*

She walks with him, in the decayed husk of another woman. The other-other woman. She would laugh if she could.

Leon doesn’t say anything about the zombie trailing after him like a lost puppy. Too professional to comment maybe, or perhaps flattered by her twisted attraction to him.

The cup of coffee Tom got for her has gone cold in her hands. Grace is too busy walking the overrun hallways of the lab with Leon like they’re out for an evening stroll. She imagines that she’s back in her FBI days. They’ve sent her on fieldwork with the handsome DSO agent because she survived Wrenwood, or maybe Rhodes Hill and now she’s a counter-bioterrorism agent. In the big leagues with Leon Kennedy. 

In this dream of a dream, he’s her mentor. She’s a shy rookie agent he saved from an outbreak at Rhodes Hill where she was sent to investigate. He’s cold and quiet but oh so kind. She has a crush on him, but he’s married. She’ll think of him while she writes the after-action report, his arms that cut through sinew and flesh like nothing, his fingers that pull the trigger of his hand-canon without breaking his bones in the recoil, his sweet mouth that smiles at her when she packs up for the night and offers her a ride home.

She’ll decline, and think of him all the way in the bus, and then while she’s eating dinner, and then later, in the comforting space between almost sleep and memory when she will put a hand between her legs and imagine it’s him and his fingers.

The ache in this dream is the bittersweet hurt of an unrequited crush. Simple, bearable. Survivable. She’ll cry over him for maybe a year, and then she’ll move on. Not the haunting of a knife, or the cold press of metal against her cunt. Not the promise of a bullet that he has still yet to keep. Not a ring and no wife in an empty house. Just the two of them and all her trauma spilled out on the floor.

“What’s it like?” he asks her, breaking the dream of a dream of a dream. “Being in two places at once.”

She doesn’t tell him she’s in three places right now. “It was…s-strange at first,” she says. “D-Dizzying.”

He grunts as he pulls a cupboard aside that was blocking their way, then motions her forward.

“And now?”

“F-Feels more, um, stable, I guess.”

“Does it—hurt?”

She tilts her head, the dead woman tilts her head too. “Hurts?”

“When you…” he makes a vague gesture around her.

She shakes her head. Realises he’s elsewhere so she makes the zombie beside him shake her head. “It’s like, um, putting on glasses for the first time. I used to get h-h-headaches.”

“Not anymore?”

“No.”

She’s sure somewhere out there there’ll be an analyst making a note of all of this. Going through the transcripts of her small talk, combing it for relevant information about Elpis. Could have been her in another life. In this one she doesn’t get sent to the field. Leon still finds her, recruits her, and puts her in front of a screen to analyse terabytes of data, find all the right patterns that lead to possible bioterrorism. They stop bad things from happening. There is no ring this time. She still has a crush. He knows but he makes no moves. She asks him out first. Stammering, shy, stupid.

He says yes.

Grace lets the waves wash this dream off her skin. It’s too sweet, too unreal. It would never happen like that. She doesn’t deserve good things. Not in this life, not in others either.

“Sherry, I’m at the terminal.”

Grace watches from the sidelines, half drowning, half dreaming, as Leon follows Sherry’s instructions over comms. He spares her a glance, leans to the side without taking his eyes off the screen to grab a chair and motions for her to take a seat.

She does. Seated in two place at once, while a few other eyes run, scream, claw themselves through the facility. She considers catching them again, sending them back on her mission but shatters violently when she sees his photo on the screen. Victor.

She switches to Leon’s eyes to read the files. A sticky, cold feeling descending down her spine, making all her nerve endings tingle through the numbness of the water. He was here. He was here.

Where she sits now. Victor sat here. Same chair, same room. Breathed the same air. Coughed. Smiled, in that sticky way of his. His thin tongue tasting the air. How long ago? She reads but there’s nothing.

“Hey” Leon says. “He isn’t here.”

He looks at the body that isn’t hers and she realises that it’s shaking. In her real one, in the makeshift seat far away she’s still as stone. Unmoving. Stuck. Her feet nailed to the ground, her hands bound, her mouth gagged. In a gurney, strapped upside down to let the blood flow down from her veins into a gleaming bottle for collection.

She can’t see the sun, can’t see the sky. Hasn’t felt the rain in two years. Victor’s hand wraps around her throat. Cold, leathery. Devoid of life because he’s more virus than man. The way he pumped himself full of the T-virus, and something more, something beyond Grace’s reach. It didn’t listen to her. He didn’t listen to her.

He’ll break Leon, she knows. Make her watch. He always made her watch.

“And even if he was,” Leon murmurs. Voice quiet and lethal. The slow simmer of anger that was always at a steady boil, “you don’t have to worry about that fuck while I’m around.”

She’s afraid of Leon too though. Of what he can do to her, of everything she’ll let him do. And of all the things Victor could do to him, just to break Grace. Or even just for amusement.

She tries to open her mouth, sound out the words, say she’s fine but her tongue is glued to the roof of her mouth, and her lips are stitched together so when she tries to pry them apart only a pathetic sound leaves her throat.

“Grace, he’s not here.” Leon is firm. He believes it. “I made sure. Wouldn’t have brought you along if he was.”

There are so many things she wants to say to this. She wants to laugh at his face just to make him mad at her. Spit at him, push him, tell him she hates him. But she doesn’t. It’s sad, it’s stupid, it’s fucking pathetic—but she believes him.

She lets the water drag her further under. Where there are no lights, and she can’t see the rippling sunlight above. The cold is a blanket around her—her eyes, her ears, her fractured mind.

“S-Six incoming,” she says. “East corridor.”

*

She makes them stand in line, and all Leon has to do is shoot them, one after the other. They wait for Sherry to extract all they need from the terminal before they move on. Now it’s just cleanup. And then home, Leon says.

What's actually be home for him, though? A townhouse in DC probably. She knows that's where DSO's main branch is. He probably stays close. His wife's waiting for him there probably, or maybe she’s also a DSO operative, away on her own mission. That would explain why he has all this time to spend with Grace. Fool around, her treacherous mind supplies.

There’s no shame so deep underwater so she only needs a flick of her wrist to send the thought scattering.

She gets up from the chair. Here, and far away too. “We have more coming our way. Bloated ones.”

“Blisterheads,” Leon looks down at himself—his gloved hand and the gun in holds. Silver, and a black grip. Wings. He grips it tighter for a second, makes a decision, and then flips it around—holding it out to her, barrel pointed at himself.

“You got any shooting experience?"

She looks at him mutely. Not comprehending what he’s trying to say.

“I was—” she gulps. Water in her lungs. She can see a pinprick of shimmery light that leads up to the surface. She pries her tongue down. “B-Basic training at the Academy. And then I was—um, practising on my own. My aim isn’t—wasn’t—the best.”

He nods like he understands. But instead of taking the gun back he brings up her hands and wraps them around the grip. “Feet apart. Use both hands. This one recoils like a bitch.”

“I don’t understand.”

Leon grins. All wide and wild teeth. Lopsided, hair in his eyes, lips that she has kissed. “You catch even a shadow of Gideon’s ugly ass here, you take the shot. Promise you there won’t be enough pieces left to salvage.”

There’s a glint in his eyes that makes her ache. It hurts to hate him, and hurts not to. Hurts to see the ring on his finger and know that she can’t kiss him again.

The gun is so much heavier in her hands than she thought it would be. She had held it before but he’d carried most of the weight. She imagines the recoil of such a beast of a weapon might blow her own brains out.

Delicious.

“Come on,” Leon gestures for her to follow him. “Let’s get out of here. I’m tired of this place.”

She is too. She follows after him, a few paces behind, half a mind all over the place, warning him of incoming enemies before they catch up. He makes swift work of them. Switched off to a handgun with lesser firepower, but that doesn’t slow him down one bit. Whatever he doesn’t shoot dead, he finishes off with his hatchet. Glints of silver and black. His hair, his axe, his ring, his eyes.

If he swings that hatchet hard enough to separate her head from her shoulders, will she be able to feel it? Will she be able to stitch herself back?

When the last of the infected come shambling in, Leon shakes the hatchet to wipe out the blood and motions with his head towards them.

“You wanna have a go?”

The gun is steady between the fingers of the other, but the paper cup in her hands shakes. She feels herself rising up to the surface as she aims—feet apart, both hands, shoulders locked to brace for impact, and boom!

The ricochet hits all the way to the bones of her real body. A warm, tingling sensation that pulls her up even further.

The three infected bodies that were making their way to her are crumpled on the floor. Shattered. One clean line, and their heads are pasted over the walls, little bloody pieces. An explosion of delightful gore. Hot against her cheeks. The splatter found her too, under the water, against all odds. Grace feels a tear against her cheek—her real cheek.

The recoil sent the body she was highjacking tumbling backwards until Leon catches her. He’s careful with her, even when it’s not really her.

There’s something boyish in his smile. Some trace of youth in the crinkles under his eyes. Some of the splatter got on him too but he’s unbothered. He looks at her with pride. Little bits of happy things pulling at his lips.

She wants to kiss him. Shove this dead tongue down his throat, hold him down and make him retch. Then bite down so hard she tears something. Instead she smiles back at him, and watches the spark in his eyes and the crinkle of his mouth turn to horror as she places the gun in her mouth and pulls the trigger before he can stop her.

It’s beautiful. The tearing of flesh, the burn, the pain. Sweet, sticky. Hot against her face. To be undone. She hears Leon curse. Not next to her because she blew out those ears, those eyes, that whole face—but through the comms and she gasps, half pleasure, half pain, quiet enough for just the two of them.

She ducks back underwater because she knows what's coming. Anger. He's bound to be mad at her. She doesn’t know why. That body wasn't hers but with the way he’s swearing to high heaven, she knows she did something wrong.

“Leon?” It’s Sherry on comms, alarmed. “What’s wrong.”

He swallows the last dredges of a soulfelt fuck, breathes through his nose, loudly. The pacing of feet, shuffles. “Nothing,” he says, eventually.

“Leon.”

“It’s nothing,” he insists. “Stubbed my toe.”

It’s Sherry’s turn to sigh.

“Lab's all clear,” Leon says. “Heading back now. We got all we wanted?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” Leon says. “Alpha team—burn the place down.”

*

He’s quiet in the car ride back. Not in an angry way, Grace notes with confused fascination. Quiet in a contemplative way.

There’s blood on his face, while she’s pristine. She’s still half living in that moment where the bullet shattered the face that wasn’t hers. If she licks the evidence of her almost death from his face, will it taste just as good?

Back at home that’s not really her home, she crawls back into bed. He doesn’t try to coax her out like he’d been doing for the past few days. Leaves her be to her moment of peace. When the dreams find her, it’s not as bad because Victor isn’t there.

It’s just Grace and Leon. A hospital bed, straps, glass walls, a jacket. He sits next to her, holding her hand, telling her she’ll be fine. It’ll be over soon.

A shadow steps up from behind him. A blur of a person. A woman with a silver ring like Leon’s. She hands him a scalpel and whispers something in his ear. He nods solemnly, and he begins to dig into Grace’s flesh.

The whole time Grace finds herself babbling apologies to the shadow of a woman. She’s sorry. She didn’t know. And by the time she did, it was too late. She's grown too attached now.

“You could have anyone,” the woman tells her while Leon slices Grace into little ribbons.

But there wasn’t—isn’t anyone else. Only the husband of a ghost who exists somewhere else. She probably doesn’t even know. Grace doesn’t think Leon calls his wife with updates on his…whatever Grace is.

She doesn’t wake up screaming but he’s there. To calm her down, to rub her back, to press her hands down against the mattress so she doesn’t scratch out her own flesh like she did last time. His touch burns her. Makes her scream, makes her want to retch with disgust at herself. Sickened by her own want. He’s gentle in his strength holding her down. Force that isn’t forceful. Not like when he tried to drag her out for the mission. Fingers that pressed into her thin wrists. She yanks a hand free, pushes him away. Screams, guttural and raw.

“Don’t touch me!”

He flinches. His grip loosens. She sobs. “D-D-Don’t…” the words trail away from her. She shuffles back, away, away from this man she wishes she hated. Her body tumbles down from the bed, trying to pull the darkness and water into her mind, but it’s too much. She’s raw from sleep, and unable to protect herself.

Large hands tug at her, the sharp presence of steel against her skin. Victor’s low voice around her neck and cold, wet skin. In the corner of the room she can’t see there’s a woman whose face she doesn’t know, saying nothing, accusing her of nothing, but it’s a heavier presence than Victor.

Leon tries to pull her up but Grace shuffles away until her back hits the wall and she curls into herself. If he touches her when she’s like this, she will break. She will break and she will forget everything that’s wrong. She will forgive him. She will let him touch her.

She can’t do that. She can’t. The woman is still in the room with them. She will always be. There and not there. Her hair is black sometimes, blonde, then red, then brown, and sprinkled with grey. Sometimes it’s silver, all of it, like Grace. But not Grace.

An ugly part of her tries to tell her that morals and anger are for the privileged. Grace can’t afford these things. Not anymore.

His hands hover around for another long moment—wanting to touch but too uncertain. She hears him swear under his breath and then eventually leave her alone. On the cold floor, by herself, in the dark.

She hears the click of the door and wants to scream for him to come back. To beg, to apologise. But she bites her lip and sobs herself to sleep instead.

In the morning, she’s back on the bed, covers on, tears wiped. She doesn’t question it. Just ducks back into the void that holds her together in one piece.

*

He takes her on two more missions. A few days of break in between.

She’s good. She behaves. Does as she’s told, even if both Sherry and Leon seem strangely bothered by her nonchalance. Sherry tries talking to her, with Leon, and away from him but Grace has nothing she can say. If she brings her head out of the darkness, she will scream until her lungs burn. She will grab the nearest gun and blow her brains out, even if she heals back in a few hours. There were many escape attempts she had tried in Rhodes Hill, before Victor crushed that out of her, so she knows better now.

She follows Leon around as if he has a tether to her. A leash to add to her collar. Even from far away, from the safety of a covered tent, barricades and soldiers around her. Even with young and foolish Tom Morris in the next seat offering her company and good humour and tea, she’s with Leon, in a corralled off street where an outbreak occurred similar to Wrenwood.

She’s in the body of a woman who was on her way to work. Other than the prick on her neck, and the blood running down her mouth, she could be alive. Her limbs move in all the right ways. Nimble, deft. This woman used to work out. Grace feels better than herself like this. Almost.

It’s a simple cleanup job. They’ve already barricaded the site, and evacuated all civilians. Only eyes running around now, to be picked off one by one by Leon and his rabid little monster. He hands her a gun almost from the start. A semi-automatic. It’s compact; not as heavy as the other one of silver and wings. This one’s got far less firepower as well.

“Go for the knees first,” Leon instructs. “Slows ‘em down. Gives you enough time to aim for the head.”

He corrects her stance, then nods with an almost smile hovering near his lips when she hits her mark in one go. His non-praise, and the tightness in his chest makes her fingertips tingle, her bones hurt. She’s not drowned herself enough to be immune to him, just at the soft brink of pain and pleasure.

He’s quick to take the gun back from her when it’s over, before she can have her suicide rehersal again. He’s been vigilant ever since the last time. He gently coaxes her back to her own body before letting the DSO cart off the dead woman to be added to their experiment stock.

“Evidence,” he tells her. But why would the DSO need evidence when there will never be a trial?

Back at home, under the safety of the blankets that smell like Leon, she overhears him on the phone with Sherry, voice low, and a sigh of frustration “— dunno what to do.” She feels him pulling at his hair, closing his eyes.

Grace doesn’t understand what he’s upset about. Couldn’t be her. She’s been on her best behaviour. Been to all the missions without a peep of complaint. She leaves the bedroom sometimes too, to sit on the couch as she lets her mind wander to his, reading through the reports he skims late at night. She lets the glass of whiskey and the black on white words on the screen lull her to sleep because he’s taken to sleeping on the sofa and she doesn’t know how to fall asleep on her own, without being pumped full of drugs.

She takes these moments to find out about Victor's whereabouts. He seems to be one step ahead of the DSO, running from state to state, one lab to another facility. She learns that they almost caught him, just a few days ago. Just one of those days where Leon had been gone from home for a good long time, leaving Grace sightless and alone, left to do whatever she wanted (and what she wanted was more sleep). He’d come back home angry and smelling like smoke. She’d felt the urge to flinch but also hold him. He'd looked like he was one strong breeze away from falling down. Instead she’d watched with his eyes as he gulped drink after drink and typed out a messy after-action report with blood still under his fingernails.

*

It all comes crumbling down on Thursday.

It’s an ugly, humid, wet morning. Rained till late last night. Grace had fallen asleep to the sound of it, and the calm of reading through another one of Leon’s reports. This one was from a raid at a Tricell facility not too far away. No trace of Victor there, but someone was cooking a nasty gourmet virus, and the DSO got tipped off just in time.

Some of these reports read like science-fiction almost. If you hand Grace a cup of tea, and unrestricted access, she could read them all in a day. Maybe even solve a case or two. Stories that can’t possibly be real, except for the parts that happened to her.

Everything is fine, until it isn’t. Grace and Leon have a better understanding now—a tentative rhythm almost. She’ll scope out the place, let Leon know enough information to plan out an entry and exit route based on the agenda—cleanup, or retrieval. Sherry’s usually on comms offering outside support—floor plans, and coordinating backup.

Grace’s carefully crafted action plan, her dispassionate, lovely detachment, the water that holds her close and cold all comes crashing down on her. The air leaves her as the car comes to a halt outside a dusty white mansion with a stone fountain right outside. Grace knows that this is not Rhodes Hill. They're nowhere near. She kept Leon's eyes on the road the whole way. And yet, it looks so much like it. Tall, grooved pillars welcoming them. A long set of stairs she had once fallen down from while making one of her escapes. Boxwood hedges like a necklace near the entrance.

Grace knows she can’t make can’t make a fuss. Can’t say no. Can’t stay in the car and refuse to leave and cry and scream and beg, but her body doesn’t want to move. She’s grown roots, dug herself into the seat and her jaw has found itself locked.

Leon turns to her, in confusion at first, but he must have noticed the similarities of the building to her old prison because he curses under his breath. A hand reaches for her, hesitates, and he drops it by his side. He’s been doing this a lot. Almost touching, then backing away as if she broke something when she rejected his touch that one time. As if he’s ashamed of what he did. The mockery of her torment. As if.

He backs the car out, throwing her a concerned look she can’t see. Breathing feels impossible until the trees around the estate cover up the view of the fountain and those white, white walls and their ornate ivory pillars.

Grace’s fingers find her elbows, crosses her arms around herself to hold the shaking back. She can hear Leon’s muted voice on comms and next to her, saying something furiously to Sherry probably. Asking the ground team to shift base elsewhere. Too close to the site. Something compromised something.

His hands are on the wheel, clenched tight, veins running up the length of his arms like rivers. That arm around her throat could snap her in two. She wants it there and she doesn’t.

She settles on the shape of them, the taut skin, the ridges, the scars. The pull of his gloves around the wheel. There’s a tightness in his jaw too. She feels it, settles herself there, follows the map of his skin. She breathes in. Out. Then in, over and over until she’s with Leon, in his car, on the nice heated seat, in her own clothes, her own body in the present and not strapped to a gurney in a room of thick white walls that absorb screams and prayers equally.

It’s okay, she tells herself. You’re okay. You’re okay. Just breathe.

“Grace,” he says, right there, next to her. With her, keeping her safe, in one piece, out of the building that he set on fire. “You with me?”

She nods.

“Okay,” he says. Nothing more. They sit there for a little longer, a silence, a stillness between them, thick with tension and comfort in equal, confusing parts. When her hands stop shaking, he starts the car.

*

It takes forty minutes to set up the base again, in a location close enough but with the direct view of the mansion obstructed. Not the most efficient, Grace knows. She notices agents throwing ugly looks towards them, safely ensconced inside the car while teams of men haul equipment, weapons, and a full ass tent through the wet, muddy ground.

Leon, inexplicably, puts on music while they wait. His fingers drum on the wheel off-key, until she mentally nudges them into following the beat without him noticing.

She was never a Metallica person but she prefers it over the silence. Could be that Leon thought heavy metal would hype her up for the fight ahead, but it really isn’t her thing even if it seems like his. He’s mouthing the words of Enter Sandman quietly. Something light in the way he nods his head in little jerky movements. She watches him through the reflection in the side mirror. His floppy hair bouncing—greys and all. His eyes are unfocused and something silly stirs in Grace.

Remember the knife.

But at this moment there is no ugly glint of steel. Only music, the heat inside the car, the steady drizzle of rain. The slow ticking of time and the fact that he delayed the entire operation just to shift the temporary base for her.

The music stops, and he tilts his head towards her.

“What’s your poison, Grace?”

She blinks at him as if she’s slow in the head.

“You don’t seem like a heavy metal girl,” he explains.

She doesn’t know how to tell him she can’t think of anything. Music has been so far from her mind for so long. It feels unreal to her now. Victor had cut her ears off once. Gutted her ear canal and watched with pleasure as they grew back but the tinnitus and ache did not leave Grace for weeks. Sounds were too much for a while. Everything was too loud, too grating, too painful.

He waits for her patiently, and Grace tries to think about that life before. That girl with her headphones and music, singing alone in her room in nothing but her underwear and tank top while she worked herself to the bone on reports for her ungrateful boss; that girl has been dead for a while, but what would she like to listen to if she were here now?

Probably something light to go with the shitty weather. A mopey song. Maybe a love song. Give her angst, give her—

“This fucking guy,” Leon curses under his breath and Grace is yanked out of her thoughts to see Tom Morris, rookie agent coming towards them. He looks like a wet puppy in the rain as he knocks on Leon’s window. He waves too, then remembers that she can’t see when Grace doesn’t bother turning her head towards him and drops his hand with a flop.

“H-Hey,” he says when Leon rolls down the window. She hears him audibly swallow with the look Leon gives him. “I, uh, sir, Agent Kennedy, sir.”

“Yes?” Leon hisses.

“We’re almost set up. I was asked to let you know the team’s about to get started.”

Leon grunts in acknowledgement. Maybe the poor boy thought they’d follow him back to camp but Leon keeps his ass firmly on the seat.

“Um,” Agent Morris moves from one foot to another. “Miss Ashcro—”

Leon rolls up the window. “Grace?”

She tilts her head up towards him.

“You—” he looks away, hands clenching. “You can stay back for today. I’ll speak with Hunnigan. The Wolves and I can take care of this.”

“Why?” she asks. It doesn’t make sense. He brought her here at knifepoint.

“Allewood House is a nursing home,” he explains. “I—I didn’t think it would be like Rhodes Hill, but of fucking course it would be triggering for you. It’s one of Umberall’s old—”

“No. Why are you doing this?” she asks, softly. Her heart is thrumming in his chest, half-exposed, bleeding. A bruised apple.

His brows pull together. “What—”

“You’re not my f-f-friend,” she bites. Right into the skin of her heart. Something bitter spilling out from the flesh. “So, w-why?”

His mouth opens. Closes.

He looks away. She feels that uncomfortable churn in his heart, tugs herself towards it, trying to make sense of the lines and undulations.

“Can’t have you going into the field in this state,” he says, but there’s something stony about the words. Like he’s reading off a script. “Could compromise the mission, endanger my men.”

“Okay,” she accepts his lies. Feels the water lapping at her neck, telling her to submerge. “Could—c-c-could you ask Tom to sit here with me?”

“Who?” he asks, incredulously. The churning in him turns into a storm, little flecks of ugly dark roots forming.

“Agent Morris,” she says. She takes hold of those roots and twists them, making the darkness inside him grow. “He’s—he’s n-nice to me.”

There’s a slight redness to Leon’s vision. A black bubbling ache in his chest that Grace pinches and prods, makes it swell like a fractured limb. A hand reaches for her, but just like every other time stops just short of touching her skin. He drops it and gets out of the car.

Grace watches him go as she closes her eyes and dips under the water. Almost, she thinks. Almost had him.