The mission went sideways before it even started.
You knew it the moment you and Leon stepped through the rusted emergency doors of the pharmaceutical facility. The air was thick with the smell of industrial chemicals and something worse, something rotting beneath the surface that turned your stomach. Intel had said the underground lab was abandoned. Intel was wrong.
"You good?" Leon asked, glancing back over his shoulder. His flashlight cut through the dim corridor, picking out peeling paint and a keypad with the dust wiped clean from its face, the overhead lights still warm.
"Perfect," you lied, adjusting your comms earpiece. "Let’s just get what we need and get out."
The mission window was tight. Get in, retrieve the T variant sample from cold storage on sub-level three, and get out before extraction moved from the rendezvous point. Simple enough for two agents of your caliber.
Sub-level one was heavy with a suffocating stillness. The low hum of the ventilation was dead, leaving only the sound of your own breathing and the hollow echo of your boots against the concrete. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, casting shadows that seemed to shift when you weren’t looking. Leon took point as he always did, his movements fluid, every step measured. You covered his six, your back against his in narrow hallways, a rhythm you’d perfected over two years of partnered missions.
He’d annoyed you at first. Too cocky, too quick with a smirk, too much of a golden boy for your taste. But somewhere between a firefight in Eastern Europe and a near-drowning in a caved-in mine shaft, the annoyance had shifted. You’d started noticing the way he always put himself between you and danger. The way he’d check your injuries before his own. The way his hand would linger on your shoulder after a close call, as if he needed to confirm you were still there.
You’d started noticing the way his eyes softened when he thought you weren’t looking, and you’d started hoping he noticed the same in yours.
The sample retrieval on sub-level three had been clean, almost suspiciously so. The cold storage unit was right where the schematics said it would be, the vial secure in its containment case, your hand closing around it with a quiet breath of relief. You made it back up to sub-level two without incident, and for a moment it almost felt easy.
Then the alarms screamed.
Red emergency lights bathed the corridor in crimson. The facility’s automated voice echoed through the halls: "Specimen displacement detected. Emergency purge protocols activated. All personnel evacuate immediately."
The sample. Taking it had triggered a failsafe.
A deep, groaning shudder ran through the floor beneath your boots. The walls cracked. Dust and concrete rained from the ceiling. Somewhere below, steel gave way with a metallic howl that pulled the air from your lungs.
"Move!" Leon grabbed your arm, pulling you toward the stairwell. "Now!"
You ran as the corridor bucked and swayed like a ship in a storm. Pipes burst along the walls, spraying hot steam that hissed against your skin, the heat stifling, the air thick with dust that coated your throat and made every breath feel like swallowing sand. A light fixture crashed down inches from your head, glass shattering across the floor.
The stairwell door was jammed.
Leon threw his weight against it once, twice. On the third hit, it groaned open, and you both plunged upward. Sub-level one. Ground level just above. The exit was close. You could make it.
Then the landing beneath your feet gave way.
It happened so fast, one second you were running, the next you were falling, concrete and rebar crumbling like wet sand, the floor dissolving into a gaping maw of darkness. You barely had time to scream.
His fingers caught your wrist, and the jolt nearly tore your arm from its socket. You dangled over the edge, legs kicking at empty air, the ruins of the stairwell yawning beneath you like an open grave. Debris rained past you into the void.
"I’ve got you." Leon’s other hand gripped the remaining edge of the floor, knuckles white. His face was pale, jaw clenched so tight you could see the muscle jumping. "I’ve got you. Hold on—"
He pulled. You could see the strain in every line of his body, the way his shoulder screamed under the weight, the way his grip on the crumbled edge was slowly slipping. Another tremor shook the facility. A section of ceiling crashed down behind him, blocking the path forward.
"No." The word was sharp. Final. He pulled again, gaining inches. "Not without you."
"The exit’s blocked! Try the east wing! Just go!"
"Leon, please." Your voice cracked. You could feel your wrist slipping from his grip, sweat and dust making your skin slick. Tears burned your eyes, but you blinked them away. "You have to go. You have to go now, or neither of us makes it out."
He stared at you. His blue eyes wild with something raw and desperate and broken. His grip tightened.
"Leon." You made your voice steady. Gentle. The way you’d always wanted to say his name but never let yourself. "It’s okay."
Another tremor. The floor beneath Leon lurched. His anchor hand slipped another inch.
A second collapse. The section of floor you were clinging to gave way, and Leon’s hand was torn from your wrist as gravity pulled you into the dark.
The last thing you saw was his face, mouth open in a scream you couldn’t hear over the roar of collapsing concrete, and his hand reaching for you, empty.
Leon didn’t remember getting out.
One moment he was on the landing, screaming your name into the dark, reaching for a hand that was no longer there. The next, hands were on his shoulders. The extraction team, he’d realize later. Hauling him backward through the east wing corridor as the facility groaned its final breath behind them.
They’d come in through the east wing entrance, his only path out, the one you’d told him to take. If he’d stayed on that landing even thirty seconds longer, he’d have been buried with you.
He fought them. Threw elbows, shoved bodies. Tried to run back into the collapsing building. Back to you.
"Let me GO! She’s still in there!"
"Kennedy, the whole structure is coming down—"
Two agents held him back. A third hooked an arm across his chest and dragged him backward. He watched, chest heaving, as the facility folded in on itself like a dying animal. The ground shuddered beneath their boots. A plume of dust and debris erupted into the night sky, and the sound, the grinding, shrieking, crushing sound of tons of concrete and steel collapsing into the earth, was the loudest thing he'd ever heard.
And the silence was worse.
They took him back to the provisional field HQ, a repurposed warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Someone offered him a cup of coffee. He didn’t take it. Someone asked him questions. He didn’t answer. He sat on a chair in the back corner, elbows on his knees, hands hanging limp between his thighs, staring at nothing.
He’d tried the comms. Again and again and again, until his thumb was sore from pressing the button. Static. Nothing. He told himself it was the building’s reinforced structure blocking the signal. He told himself that meant nothing.
The mission commander approached him carefully. She stood in front of him for a long moment before speaking.
"The structural team is doing their assessment. The collapse was extensive. Sub-levels two and three took the worst of it. The stairwell and central corridors are collapsed. There may be pockets of integrity in the outer sections, but we can’t confirm. Ground level has partial structure, but it's not safe to—"
"Leon, I’m sorry. She was a good agent. One of the best—"
The commander’s silence was heavy.
"She’s not." His voice was quiet in a way that was worse than shouting, raw and scraped out, like something bleeding. "You don’t know her like I do. She’s smart. She’s resourceful. She would have found a way."
"Leon, the sub-levels are severely compromised. There’s nothing left to reach."
"I don’t care what the report says." He looked up at her then, and she saw something in his eyes that made her breath catch, a kind of desperate, defiant hope that looked almost like grief. "She’s not dead."
The commander pressed her lips together. She placed a hand on his shoulder, squeezed once, and walked away.
Leon stared at the far wall. His hand opened and closed. Open and closed. Like a heartbeat.
An hour passed. Then two.
The field HQ hummed with quiet activity, agents debriefing, techs running analysis, medics treating minor injuries. Leon sat in the same spot, unmoving. A statue in the middle of controlled chaos.
He kept replaying it. The way your wrist had slipped from his grip. The way his fingers had closed on empty air. The way you’d said his name, like you weren’t falling. Like you weren’t afraid. Like you were trying to protect him, even at the end.
He’d known how he felt for a while. He’d just buried it. Easier, safer than admitting the person he worked beside every day had become the person he didn’t want to work without.
There had been chances. Too many. Glances that lingered a second too long. Touches that didn’t quite let go. Words that rose to the surface and stayed there, unspoken, because the timing was wrong, because the job was complicated, because saying it might change everything.
Now you were gone, and none of it mattered. He’d run out of chances to be brave, and he hadn’t taken a single one. Mission after mission, your back to his in narrow hallways, danger closing in, and always the same thought running through his head, steady as a pulse: I would die for this person. I would die for you.
He dropped his head into his hands.
The commotion started near the entrance.
Leon didn’t look up. He didn’t have the energy. More agents coming back from the site. More bad news.
"Found her in the service tunnel near the east perimeter—"
"Dehydrated, possible fracture, but she’s conscious—"
He was on his feet before he made the conscious decision to move, his chair clattering backward, his body shoving through the crowd of agents and medics gathered near the warehouse doors. His heart hammered so hard he could feel it in his throat. In his temples. In his fingertips.
You were sitting on the back of an emergency vehicle, a shock blanket draped around your shoulders, your left arm in a makeshift sling, your earpiece missing. Your face was pale and smudged with dust and dried blood, a cut above your eyebrow, a bruise blooming along your jaw. Your hair was tangled and grey with concrete powder. Your lips were cracked. You looked exhausted. You looked battered.
Your eyes found his through the crowd, and something in your expression shifted. Surprise. Relief. Then a small, trembling smile that barely held.
Leon moved. He crossed the distance in long strides, shouldering past a medic who tried to step in his way. His hands found your face before he could stop himself, cupping your jaw, thumbs brushing the dirt from your cheekbones. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving, his eyes searching your face, finding every scratch and bruise, like he needed to see for himself that you were real and breathing.
"You’re alive." His voice cracked on the second word. "You’re alive."
"I’m alive." Your voice was rough and dry. You whispered it. Your good hand came up to cover his, your fingers trembling against his knuckles. "I’m alive, Leon."
The hug was fierce and desperate. His arms wrapped around you like he was trying to press you into his chest, to fuse you together so you couldn’t ever be pulled away again. One hand cradled the back of your head, fingers tangling in your dust-streaked hair, while the other splayed across your back, firm and careful, mindful of the sling, mindful of everything. He held you so tightly you could feel his heartbeat against yours, fast and wild.
You buried your face in his neck and held on just as hard, your good hand twisting in the back of his jacket, the shock blanket falling from your shoulders. You breathed him in, smoke and sweat and gunpowder, the aftermath of every mission you’d ever survived together, and felt the tremors running through his body.
"I thought I lost you." His voice was wrecked against your hair. "I saw you fall and I couldn’t reach you."
"You held on." You murmured it into his neck. "Just long enough for me to grab a rebar on the way down. Swung into a slab on sub-level two instead of falling straight to the bottom. Thought I was dead for a second."
He pulled back, his eyes searching yours. "Sub-level two collapsed."
"Not all of it. The maintenance corridors were still standing... barely." You took a shaky breath. "Found a ventilation shaft. Crawled through until I hit a service tunnel. Came out by the east fence."
You reached into your jacket with your good hand and pulled out the containment case. Cracked but intact. "Didn’t let it get crushed."
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Of course you didn’t." He took it from you and set it aside. Then his hands found your face again.
"I’m never doing that again." His voice dropped. "I’m not letting you out of my sight. I don’t care what protocol says. I don’t care if you tell me to go. I’m staying."
"And I need to tell you something." He exhaled hard. "Because I almost lost the chance, and I can’t keep pretending anymore."
He leaned in. The kiss was soft. His hands tilted your face up to his like this was something he’d been waiting to do right. You could taste the salt on his skin, feel the slight tremor in his breath that he was trying hard to hide. You kissed him back, full of every almost, every near-miss, every glance that lasted a beat too long.
When he pulled away, his forehead rested against yours. His eyes stayed closed, and he was smiling in a way you’d only ever caught glimpses of before.
"I love you," he said quietly. "I’ve loved you for so long, and I’m done being stupid about it."
You smiled back, the kind that reached your eyes, and your fingers curled into the front of his shirt.
"Took you long enough, Kennedy."
He let out a breathless laugh and kissed you again. Deeper this time. His hand slid into your hair while your good arm wrapped around his neck. Around you, the warehouse had gone quiet, agents pretending very hard to look elsewhere, the commander pressing her fingers to her lips to hide a small, rare smile.
You didn’t care. He was warm and solid and real, his heart beating against yours, his breath mingling with your own.
The facility was rubble. The mission was over. Your arm throbbed, and you were fairly sure you had a cracked rib, and you were covered in so much dust you looked like a ghost.
But you were alive. He was alive.
And the line that had kept you apart for two years didn’t exist anymore.
Later, when the medics had finally pried you apart long enough to treat your injuries and you were settled on a cot in the medical bay, Leon pulled up a chair beside you and refused to move.
His hand found yours under the thin blanket, his fingers lacing through yours, his thumb tracing slow circles over your knuckles. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. His hand stayed in yours the entire night.
Sometime around three in the morning, you stirred awake. Your eyes found him in the dim light, head tilted back against the wall, eyes closed, breathing slow and even. He looked younger asleep. The tension he carried in his jaw and his shoulders smoothed out, and for once he looked like someone who hadn’t spent the last decade carrying the weight of every nightmare the world could produce.
You squeezed his hand gently. His fingers tightened in response, even though he didn’t open his eyes. You smiled and let your eyes drift shut again.
And neither of you let go.
