Chapter Text
“Don’t,” Chris says, swiping the can of Modelo and sour patch kids to the other side of the table.
It’s a move that would work on a toddler. Or a 48 year old man who just drove across six state lines and is too tired to get up and walk to the other side of the room. In all these years, Chris wonders if anything has changed. Gut biomes, bad habits, wolfish haircuts.
“What?” Leon protests. “It’s stress food.”
“You’re too old for stress food. Try yoga.”
Leon’s eyes narrow. “Oh, like downward dog ever mellowed you out.”
When Chris blinks, unmoved, Leon leans forward in sharp accusation. “Flaming hot cheetos under your pillow on the air base? Ring a bell?”
“No,” Chris orders. “Wait.”
In full surrender, Leon yawns. He slumps down in his chair, hands carving a path through his hair, and does as he’s told.
Ten minutes later, there’s a thump by his head. He pulls himself up, vision bleary, and there are two pieces of ceramic sitting on the table now: one mug of steaming black coffee, and one bowl brimming with breakfast.
Really. It’s like someone took the idea of breakfast and slurried it all together. There’s bits of bacon tossed together with spinach and cherry tomatoes, all of it bedded over a cloudcover of potatoes and gleaming with oil and seasoning. Two eggs have been cracked over the top. The yolks are as orange as candy.
“Huh?” he asks, scraping himself off the table. “Is this Jimmy Dean or something?”
Arms crossed, Chris studies him. “No, dipshit.”
“You didn’t have to make me this,” he argues dryly. “I brought my own breakfast.”
“Yeah,” Chris snorts. “I think you understand the concept of BYOB perfectly well, Leon. Eat.”
With a grumble, Leon snatches the fork off the table. He spears it into the bowl, gathering up a tine-ful of food, and shoves it into his mouth. It looks healthy, and he’s inclined to make a show of suffering about it, but immediately, the heat of the spices rush in to make his mouth water. The martyr in him dies. The martyr in him becomes as saint as he breaks the egg yolk and watches it run rivulets into the food.
“It’s good,” he admits, and the expression on Chris’ face softens. Then, grumbling, “god fucking damn it, Chris, I really can’t stand you sometimes.”
Satisfied, Chris smiles.
The cayenne is just set dressing, and it does the fucking trick. Flaming hot cheetos his ass; even decades later, Chris knows exactly how to get him his nutrients.
Chris sits down, joining him at the table, and Leon is aware of Chris’ eyes on him as he eats. His gaze is blunt, perceptive, studying. Still, Leon risks a curious glance, eyes flicking up from his plate to take in the other man.
Neither decades nor retirement have changed Chris in the slightest. His biceps beef out of the sleeves of his t-shirt, giving him the air of a man who has never once relaxed, and he doesn’t look aged as much as he just seems… worn. Like he’s spent so long trying to polish himself that he’s started to erode.
For a moment Leon thinks of Dorian Gray, and he wonders if Chris is like himself: deteriorating not in the likeness of some hidden portrait, but on the inside, remaining beautiful, but in secret becoming more grotesque by the day.
He must still be training. Or at least working out. He can’t be that blessed. These days Chris takes a more passive role in his squad, but if that’s the extent of it, it doesn’t look like his body got the memo. Leon wonders if old age will deflate Chris’ brawn, or if he’ll be the world’s most built 100-year old square dancer, and it’ll take decomposers eons of evolution just to strip the muscle from his bones.
All at once, Leon realizes that they haven’t spoken in minutes.
He sets down the fork and takes a sip of coffee. “You thinkin’ ‘bout how old I look?” he asks, blowing into the steam.
Chris doesn’t answer for a second. Then he shakes his head. “You look the same as you always have to me,” he says quietly, and means it.
Gazing back at him, Leon’s eyes are just the same too. Kissed at the corners by crow’s feet, but that same stormy blue. They’re the color of a sea without sun, the color of gunpowder without fire. Little streaks of ions fleck his irises, positives pulling towards the negative. No fire, not for now.
“Why are you here?” Chris finally asks.
A sardonic grin smirks out from Leon’s bitterness as he leans he face into the steam. “Job hasn’t killed me yet.”
“On my doorstep,” Chris elaborates. “At six in the morning. Before I’ve even gotten my jammies off.”
Leon smiles wider, a rough delight gleaming in a pointed canine.
Because I missed you, Chris wants him to say. Because we’re both getting older, and I can’t stand to go another year without you.
No. He doesn’t want that, not really. Chris hopes that every desolate moment he’s spent alone since Ethan’s death has been one where Leon’s world ballooned. He hopes it’s been a life filled with rewards and risks, losses and bliss, and more importantly, that it’s been inflated with motion, with progress.
All the things Ethan never got to have.
Ethan… Chris hasn’t thought of Ethan in…
There’s something happening in this dining room right now. It’s not like his own balloon is bursting, or deflating, it’s more like… it’s as if a thick dust has settled over Chris through the years, and he’s only becoming aware of it now.
For a horrible moment, he wants to shoo Leon off his doorstep. Rip off his metaphorical bib, wash his plate, and forget this ever even happened.
Because seeing Leon is like shaking off the thickest layer of the Chris Redfield cast. A saran wrap of an identity that’s clung onto him for so long it’s become his sarcophagus. All at once, all the years are flaking off him, leaving him suddenly shivering and raw. Kaleidoscope slides flash dizzyingly through his third eye: Sheva, Finn, Piers, Wesker, Ethan- people who he doesn’t think about anymore, people who don’t exist within the walls of his present day existence- and he is repulsed, even as he stands vulnerable and scared, to see the ugly wasp’s nest of a husk that he has left behind.
That thing was on me? he wonders strickenly. All this time?
“So.” Leon sets down the coffee like he’s about to say something that requires the kind of magnitude required by throat-clearing. But then he doesn’t speak. Instead, he shifts in his chair.
His fingers cook around the collar of his shirt. He pulls the fabric away.
Chris just watches, searching for what it is in the strange gesture that Leon is trying to tell him. Bite me, maybe. Or, See? I’m harmless.
And then, cruelly, what didn’t exist mere seconds now swallows his entire world.
Chris goes white. A hot pulse missiles through his gut, collapsing the infrastructure of his world.
“No,” he says.
No, he thinks. Not Leon.
Suddenly Leon’s eyes are a gossamer dark. Gone is the morbid quip he might once have used to soften the blow, and in its place is just a morbid knowing. A bottomless acceptance, like an endless black that no longer yearns for stars.
No, I stayed away from him, Chris’ mind races. I did everything right.
He loved him from far away. Loved him in a way that couldn’t hurt him.
“What-” Chris hears himself say, everything feeling so far away. “What is that?”
But Chris knows what that is.
That patch of rot on Leon’s neck is horrifically familiar. It is the fate of every man that Chris has ever loved.
Leon shrugs again, violently unbothered. “I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.”
“No,” Chris says again, but this time, he whispers it.
There’s sunlight coming in through the windows now, pulling reds out of the wood of the dining table, washing bright over the modest blues on the wall. He knows what happens to the people he loves.
Piers, oozing out of himself at the bottom of the sea. Wesker, shredded by black tendrils, his body feeding itself to that fucking thing. Ethan, encased in black mold, the darkness devouring him and returning him to the hivemind.
It’s why he’s kept away from Leon all these years; he knows what happens when he gets too close. But here he is anyway, claimed by it just the same.
Chris realizes with a sickening lurch that all those years of staying his hand, never calling, never texting, pushing away even the thought of the one person he still longed for… none of it ever mattered.
And now he can never get it back.
“Damn,” Leon whistles through his teeth. “And here I thought for sure you’d be the guy.”
“Leon,” Chris says hoarsely. “How bad is it?”
With a sigh, Leon looks down at where his hands are folded on his lap. He pulls them out, then one by one, slips the leather gloves off him.
“Pretty bad,” he growls, holding them up for Chris to see.
Strings of black infection cling to his hands. They snake up between his knuckles, licking at his fingers, then run back down his wrists and palms, creating a spiderwebbing of fungal patches that’ve fused with his skin.
Seeing the look on Chris’ face, Leon bites off a bitter grin. “Yeah. It’s a whole shitshow.”
“How did you- when-”
“About five months ago. And I don’t know.” He frowns, wringing a hand around the gloves. “No one seems to know. I was hoping the BSAA might. And then, when I found out why you left, I was hoping that… you would.”
A pain in his throat, Chris nods. Leon stares up at him, eyes sharply focused, as Chris takes another step forward until he’s leaning over Leon.
Gently, nervous that he might hurt him, Chris takes Leon’s wrist into his grasp.
The gesture is instantly familiar, except that Leon’s hands are larger now, rougher. He’s surprised they aren’t shaking as he tilts Leon’s palm over to examine the dark webbing running freely across his knuckles.
Chris’ breathing shallows as he remembers a house in Louisiana covered in this stuff. The strings of mold that Ethan oozed in the end, bubbling up from his pores, spilling from every orifice.
He can’t look at this. He lets go and turns away.
“It’s like something I’ve seen before,” he confirms, blinking at the floor. “But not exactly the same.”
Leon closes his eyes and nods, and Chris wonders why it’s never him. Why he’s never the one who these vines of fate cling to, creeping down his neck, up legs, slithering one step closer to his heart every day that he goes on.
For the past decade, Chris has kept a life so sedentary and quiet it’s like he’s already in the grave. If he hides behind these four walls, he won’t have to face the world. If nothing ever happens to him, or around him, or because of him, he never has to know that he’s still alive.
But here it is anyway. The raven at his window. The reaper at his door.
And that’s not all.
“There’s…” Leon starts, swallowing. “There’s something else.”
-
A couple weeks ago, it started whispering to him.
Leon still remembers it- that first lurch-out-of-bed, hot-with-sweat, cold-with-the-chills midnight fever.
Soil, it had said, stroking gently on his head, and ever since then it has never stopped begging him for it.
Soil. And Chris.
Now his mind is flush with the image that’s sprawled itself across his consciousness: a gravescape of loose earth, its surface softened by the rain.
In his dreams he’s always digging. His palms become spades and he claws at the earth, making a hole he can wriggle into, obsessively digging his way to the only relief he can imagine. And it works. Parting for him as if they’ve been waiting, all the nutrients and minerals and worms of the earth embrace him, swallowing him whole.
He becomes the runoff, the weeds. He sinks into a bed of flowers that morph into the shape of a mattress underneath him, until all of a sudden, everything is okay again. Because… because Chris is there.
Suddenly this hole in the ground is not a grave anymore. It’s a connubial bed, and in it, wrapped around him like a garden made of flesh, is Chris.
Leon rolls over, his heart thudding, and the sight of Chris spears him with a glowing innocence that he can’t remember ever possessing.
“I need you,” Leon whispers, his voice raw with the shock of it. “I never realized how bad I needed you.”
Chris stares, like he can’t speak, but in his eyes, Leon sees an echo of himself. I need you too, Chris says without ever uttering a sound.
Then they’re kissing. Then they’re embracing, bodies melting together, Chris sighing in heavy want, Leon gasping in relief, and everything is soft until Chris suddenly gapes up at him, his eyes wide and afraid, and Leon’s body goes cold.
At first he can’t see what Chris is reacting to. In his mind, like a drawing held up to the light, Leon is seeing something a million miles away: a forgotten guitar. A swath of brown leather. The words Made in Heaven etched in peeling letters, a missing L on a banner, a D rusting in a mound of rubble.
“Leon,” Chris whispers, gentle even in his fright.
Leon goes to ask him, what? Except when he opens his mouth to speak, a bubble pops on his lips. He swallows, surprised, and presses his fingers to his cheek.
They’re soapy. Wet. He’s been crying.
He pulls back his hand and Chris’ eyes rove in terror over the black mold staining his fingertips.
-
In the amber glow of the bar, Chris’ wrinkles are all smoothed out to the point of youthhood.
Nothing can be done about the way his forehead knits together, though, and not much could soften the gritty thoughts churning in his skull, visibly milling down everything Leon has told him.
The glass in front of Leon is chilled and his beer foams over the edge, leagues away from the gas station 6-pack that he snatched on his way to Chris. Still, it churns sourly in his gut, not quite tasting like anything. It’s doing nothing for his nerves either. Or for the look on Chris’ face now that he’s spilled his guts about the dream.
Is this where Chris comes to think, Leon wonders. Is this his favorite stool, in his favorite spot in the city?
There’s laughter here. Other men at the bar are having a better time than they are, and the ones having a worse time are certainly being louder about it too. It doesn’t matter. To him they’re all just background noise. All Leon can see is Chris’ face, twisted in thought, he hopes, not in pain.
“These dreams…” Chris says. He closes his eyes and rubs the space between them forcefully. “They’re what made you want to come here?”
They’re what made me have to come here, Leon thinks desperately. It’s the only thing that could stop my body from screaming.
“And?” Chris prods when Leon just nods. “How are you feeling now?”
Somewhere towards the back of the room, a pool game starts and balls go clattering in a dozen directions. A dart hits the edge of a bullseye and an orchestra of voices whoop disappointedly.
“It’s like I can breathe again,” he answers. For now.
Like he can breathe, he thinks, as he leans back in his chair and takes another drink that just feels like a throat clenching around liquid… but not like his body is actually taking in oxygen.
He remembers, in his dreams, that feeling of the soil swallowing him down. The way it fixed his wrongness in an instant, making his skin stop gasping, making his soul sit steady in his flesh. In his sleep there’d been a stillness that he hasn’t felt since.
“I went out,” he confesses, eyes rolling closed to remember it. “In the night. Into my fucking backyard.”
When he opens his eyes, Chris is searching them. Like he can see the soil and the nighttime singing beyond Leon’s pupils.
“I lied flat, shoved my hands into the dirt, and I felt…” He smiles, taking in a breath before shrugging. “Nothing. I felt nothing.”
Chris regards him warily. “You went outside, or you found yourself outside?”
The ambience of the bar falls away as he recalls it: the sudden lurch to consciousness, finding himself down to his elbows in the garden, his body trembling in the cold.
He’d been digging by the fence encircling his property, but in his body he’d felt none of the relief that was present in his dreams. Just a ragged sense of wrongness. Wrongness, and a burning need to get in his car, take nothing, and go.
In the absence of answering, Leon swallows another gulp.
-
“I can’t believe this is your car,” Chris grumbles as it responds to Leon’s touch, flashing and beeping as though offended to be parked behind the dumpsters.
Leon tucks his smile away. “I can’t believe that’s your jacket,” he counters. “Tried looking it up when I was in the bathroom and my wallet nearly shit itself. Seriously?”
He slides into the driver’s seat and Chris scoffs, making his way to the other side.
It’s blustery out. Evenings come a lot toothier around here, the hot days evaporating into cloudless, chilly skies. For all its vanity, the thing is nice to sit in. The leather sits snug around him, trapping the warmth of the day inside.
Leon looks at the steering wheel, then the gear shift, then sighs. Frowning, Chris angles forward.
That black patch of rot. It’s weird… when he thinks about losing Ethan, he thinks about a man covered in goo. He remembers the black mold eeking out of him, a substance that was sticky, almost web-like, a dark, insidious ink that sucked him in like an ocean made of sludge.
This infection, it’s…
It’s like it’s inside Leon and pushing to get out.
Without thinking, Chris wraps his fingers around his neck.
Leon’s reaction is instant. He breathes out in shock, nostrils flaring, and a small sound peeps in his throat.
“Sorry,” Chris says, retracting quickly. Then, “Can I?”
Leon isn’t quite looking at him. His eyes are set on the dashboard, intense, only doing minute flickers to watch Chris from the side. After a quiet swallow, he nods.
“Th-” Chris tries, gingerly looking for a way to let his hand sit on the back of Leon’s neck. His fingers curl inward, a small gesture to say I’m harmless, I won’t hurt you.
Slowly, he tips Leon’s jaw back to expose the full stretch of his neck.
The noise that Leon makes speaks of years of isolation. I hate this, it answers, but I trust you, Chris.
Finally, he lets his thumb touch down on that patchwork of black. As Leon holds himself steady, breathing so hard that he’s shaking, Chris runs his thumb back and forth across the marring.
It’s rough. Eczema-like. But it’s not like a fungus clinging to his skin and feeding off it… it’s more like his veins simply burst like a ballpoint pen. Chris can feel the shape of them beneath his touch, hardened where they strain as if trying to burst out of his skin.
Chris scrapes his thumb against one of the rougher patches and dead, black skin cells flake off under his fingernail.
“Would’ve…” Leon gasps shudderingly, his wit falling flat. “Would’ve looked good with a neck tattoo, huh?”
In the intense focus of his own concentration, Chris realizes he’s started cupping Leon’s throat again. “Shit,” he says, releasing it with an apology.
“As long as it wasn’t a compass,” Leon quips in a Chris-Redfield voice, filling the empty space. “A rose would’ve been cliche, but I’m fond of Roses now.”
Leon pauses, mistaking Chris’ silence. “Sorry,” he mutters.
He’s recalling the carousel wheel of photos posted by Mia through the years: Chris and Rose at the park, his body weight buckling the swings; Rosemary in her high chair, covered in mush, gross in that way that makes him adverse to children; cute in that way that makes him fond of them again, wearing Chris’ giant cap atop her tiny skull.
“Might’ve checked the Facebook now and then,” he admits. Then he scoffs. “Listen to me. The Facebook.”
“This is…” Chris withdraws his hand and looks down at the flakes he’d scraped off. All of Leon’s rambling goes quiet, a bubbling fountain severed at the jugular.
Leon’s eyes go that same shade of passionless dark, intense without any emotion attached to it. Wide and unnatural, like the halo of some dark angel.
“Give it to me straight, Captain,” he growls.
“I’ve never seen this before,” Chris tells him. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution.”
Leon studies him, waiting.
“Berkhoff,” Chris says suddenly, his voice like a snap. “She still has connections in the BSAA. She can get a blood sample in and out of a lab without raising the alarm. She’s not far. I’ll call her now.”
And Hound Wolf Alpha that he is, Chris doesn’t wait for the okay. He’s got his phone out- fucking flip phone, with number keys that screech when he presses them- and is sliding out of the car to place the call before Leon can even get in a word.
All the same.
As he relaxes back against the driver’s seat, watching Chris pace around the dumpsters and talk, Leon presses his fingertips to the patch of rot that Chris examined.
It glows, as rosy as a cherub’s asscheeks, exactly where Chris touched it.
-
“That seem okay?” Chris asks, laying yet another blanket onto the pile.
Now there’s a throw blanket and a comforter and a quilt to go with the half a dozen pillows stuffed into every corner of the couch.
“I think that if there was a pea in the cushions, I wouldn’t know a thing,” Leon grins.
“I can…” Chris colors, seeming aware that this too has become a compulsion. “I can let you use the bed. I really don’t mind sleeping on the couch. It’d be a good break for me.”
“Chris, drop it,” Leon says, rolling his eyes. “If I wanted the bed, you’d know it.”
Chris seems to flush even more vividly. Leon chooses to ignore it.
In the end, when he’s in the darkness of the living room, listening to Chris’ body weight creak around on the floorboards overhead, he sighs and pushes half the pillows onto the floor, then reaches into the pile to stuff the biggest one against his chest.
He buries his chin in it, breathing in the scent of Chris’ fabric softener.
He’s so tired. So fucking tired he can’t even fight to stay conscious. The sound of Chris moving around upstairs rocks him like a baby in a crib, or a sack of potatoes on a ship, fluttering him into unconsciousness.
All the same, when he wakes, it’s still dark.
He is standing at Chris’ front door, hands fumbling with the unfamiliar deadbolt.
Terrified, he snatches his fingers away like the metal is ablaze, and as he cradles them against his chest, they ache and twitch for soil.