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ARCHIVED: SOMEWHERE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH

CHAPTER 1: ghost in archives PAIRING: ghost!leon x fbiagent!reader SYNOPSIS: When an overworked FBI analyst like you gets aggressively blindsided by a rogue box of data in a dimly lit archive room, you expect a splitting headache, not a face-to-face confrontation with a ghost. Standing over you is Leon S. Kennedy, a renowned agent who has been legally dead for five years and who is now trapped as an invisible phantom in the cold halls of the bureau. He had long since accepted his silent, numb eternity, but all of that calm acceptance goes right out the window the moment you open your eyes, point a finger, and thoroughly panic him by looking right at him, where the boundaries between the living and the dead begin to blur under the warm glow of forbidden feelings. CONTENT WARNINGS: afab!reader, spoilers for re6, MDNI, post re6 leon, slight age difference (reader is in her mid 20s and the story takes place in 2018, 5 years after the events of re6 but leon is a ghost, so take that how you will lol), no smut in this chapter, minor physical injury / blunt force trauma, depictions of isolation and loneliness, existential dread/numbness, grief and death, angst, lots of teasing from leon (sorry), leon calls you sweetheart WORD COUNT: 23.9K AUTHOR'S NOTE: oopise... sorry for disappearing for a bit! been hit with a busy schedule nearing the end of the semester, but i finally got some time to sit down and write. this came into production after a weird ass dream i had, so i'm mostly just going with the flow and may keep this a short story with 3 chapters max, probs. there will be smut in the next chapter! just trying to figure out how it even works with a ghost... oh well... enjoyyy i will also finish up with the next part to SAY YOU'LL REMEMBER ME i promiseee MASTERLIST

When it came to workplace gossip, it was never really something that surprised you anymore. There was always a new story circulating through the bullpen every single day. Whether it was about someone from another department getting caught cheating on their spouse during an out-of-state conference, someone getting fired after completely failing a critical performance evaluation, or rumors of two agents secretly sleeping together despite the Bureau's strict policy against fraternization, there was always something to talk about.

At this point, those stories had become a form of entertainment you oddly looked forward to every morning. They served as a welcome distraction, offering a few precious minutes of shared laughter and ridiculous speculation before everyone returned to their respective cubicles to drown in endless reports and grueling paperwork.

Working as an FBI agent wasn't nearly as glamorous as the movies made it out to be. Especially not for you.

Assigned to the highly specialized division responsible for investigating acts of bioterrorism and crimes involving illegal bioweapons, your days were rarely spent chasing armed suspects down dark alleys, kicking down doors, or engaging in dramatic shootouts under flashing sirens. Instead, your life consisted of navigating endless stacks of case files, analyzing gruesome crime scene photographs, cross-referencing conflicting witness testimonies, studying clinical autopsy results, and squinting at heavily redacted documents that seemed to multiply faster than you could ever hope to clear them.

With the steady global rise of bioweapon-related crimes over the years, your division has definitely not been lacking in work. If anything, each case seemed to become increasingly more difficult, legally convoluted, and increasingly more gruesome than the last.

Some files involved entire remote villages or foreign towns that had seemingly disappeared off the grid overnight due to localized testing of experimental pathogens. Others detailed underground, dark-web auctions where rogue organizations bid millions for illegal viral samples. Many left behind crime scenes so horrific and biologically altered that even veteran agents, who had been in the Bureau for decades and thought they had seen it all, found themselves utterly unable to sleep for days afterward.

You had seen those reports far more times than you cared to admit. By now, you thought you would be completely desensitized to those sorts of things, but they still hit you very close to your heart. To know that these acts of unmitigated brutality were executed by the hands of humanity, the exact same kind that you were, was profoundly terrifying. Due to the sheer weight of what your division dealt with, you respected the hell out of the field agents from the Division of Security Operations (DSO), as well as the specialized field agents from your own Bureau division. They were the ones who mostly had to deal with these dangerous biological issues and highly unpredictable cases head-on.

You’ve had your own fair share of field work over your five-year career, but your role was strictly investigative and analytical in the aftermath. You only came in for the clean-up once the immediate physical threat had been dealt with and neutralized by tactical teams. You were merely there to take forensic photographs, collect on-site physical evidence, and interview surviving witnesses or the traumatized agents who had fought on the front lines.

Needless to say, it was not exactly the type of work one casually brought up over a nice family dinner. Perhaps that was exactly why the small, mundane moments of workplace normalcy had become so incredibly important to everyone on the floor. That is, the occasional coffee room gossip, complaining about the broken industrial printers, arguing over who had stolen the last jelly donut from the breakroom box, or making friendly bets on how long it would take for Brian from accounting to realize his wife was clearly having an affair with their personal trainer.

It was the little things. Normal things. Ordinary, boring things that reminded everyone that despite the unnatural horrors they investigated for a living, they were still regular people at the end of the day. They were still human.

So, like every morning, the breakroom had become the unofficial gathering place before everyone begrudgingly returned to their desks to face the dark reality of their files. The rich scent of freshly brewed coffee filled the room as agents from various overlapping divisions lingered around the counters. Some were still half-awake, staring blankly into their mugs, while others were already deeply engaged in animated conversations that were probably far more interesting than the static reports waiting for them on their monitors.

Most of the discussions were nothing out of the ordinary. At least, most of them.

Since today's topic was a little different. In fact, judging by the unusually serious expressions on everyone's faces and the hushed, intense whispers being exchanged over steaming coffee cups, it was safe to say today's gossip was far from ordinary.

Apparently, someone had started a rumor that the archive storage room down on the fourth floor was haunted.

"You sure you guys don't get a weird vibe from the archive storage closet?!" you heard a fellow coworker ask the group as you walked toward the coffee machine to make yourself your second cup for the morning.

Some people were sitting around the breakroom couch, some sat on the edges of the side tables while eating their breakfast, but all of their eyes were locked onto Agent Collins. He was currently telling everyone, with immense dramatic flair, about his unsettling experience in the basement storage closet the night prior.

"You guys are laughing, but I'm completely serious!" Collins insisted, pointing accusingly at everyone around him with his plastic breakfast fork. "I was down there around nine last night trying to find some old, misfiled archives from 2006, and I swear to God I saw a heavy box move right on the shelf."

Immediately, a wave of groans and skeptical laughter erupted around the room.

"Oh, here we go again."

"Collins, man, you seriously need to get some sleep."

"Didn't you tell me you were running on four hours of sleep yesterday because of the caseload?"

"You work in bioterrorism, man. You've probably seen so much messed up stuff on your computer that your brain is just trying to entertain itself at night."

A couple of people chuckled loudly while Collins looked thoroughly offended. He ran a frustrated hand through his hair, combing it back as he aggressively continued to defend himself.

"I'm serious!" he shot back, his voice rising. "There was absolutely nobody else down there! I was completely alone in that aisle, and I know for a fact I saw it shift!"

Agent Murphy nearly spat out his coffee laughing. "Maybe a rat moved it."

"A rat isn't moving a thirty-pound, tightly packed archive box, Murphy!" Collins snapped.

"Maybe the building's air conditioning?"

"There is literally no ventilation vent in that specific quadrant of the room!"

Someone else snorted from the couch. "Maybe you finally snapped after five years with the Bureau."

The room burst into another round of laughter, though Collins remained entirely adamant, his posture rigid.

"You guys can laugh all you want, but the whole room just felt weird. Like..." He paused, visibly grasping for the right words to describe it. "Cold. Unnaturally cold."

A few eyebrows raised around the breakroom. "Cold?" Agent Sanchez repeated, tilting her head.

"Yeah, cold," Collins nodded vigorously, looking around for an ally. "Like, one second I was completely fine, and the next, I got this incredibly weird, freezing shiver straight down my spine. It wasn't a normal draft from a doorway. You know that distinct feeling when somebody is standing right behind you in the dark and you can just tell they're there? It felt exactly like that."

He rubbed his arms through his uniform at the mere memory of it. "It felt exactly like that."

"Oh my God," Murphy laughed, shaking his head. "You're telling me you got haunted by old paperwork."

"Maybe it was the ghost of the paperwork we've killed over the years," someone joked from the couch, drawing more snickers.

"No, seriously!" Collins protested, frustrated. "I swear something was in that room with me!"

You quietly listened to the entire conversation while slowly pouring sugar into your mug, trying your best not to laugh at his increasingly dramatic storytelling. The sound of the coffee machine humming and the sharp smell of fresh espresso mixed with the loud, casual chatter of the room.

Truthfully, looking closely at him, Collins looked genuinely bothered. He wasn't necessarily terrified, but he was deeply unsettled about his experience in that closet. It was like he himself wasn't entirely convinced of the supernatural explanation, but he knew what his senses had registered, and that alone was incredibly strange. After all, everyone in your division had seen things in forensic reports that would give ordinary civilians nightmares for a lifetime—the kind of gruesome, real-world things that completely desensitized you to just about anything that wasn't directly related to the crimes and biological works of bioterrorism.

Ghost stories were hardly something that would shake seasoned federal agents, and yet Collins looked like a man who knew exactly what he had witnessed, and he was visibly upset that nobody believed him, making him thoroughly frustrated.

"You know what?" Collins huffed, standing up abruptly from the counter. "Fine. Laugh all you want. But when one of you gets dragged into the afterlife by a heavy metal filing cabinet, don't come crying to me."

With that final declaration, he left the breakroom with a sharp huff, taking his half-eaten breakfast with him back to his cubicle, which earned another round of parting laughter from everyone left behind. You yourself couldn't help but smile into your coffee cup, thinking to yourself that the workplace gossip was really getting creative these days.

Though... as you stirred your coffee absentmindedly, you couldn't help but think back to the basement archive room. Because now that Collins had explicitly mentioned it... it did always feel strangely colder down there whenever you had to pull physical files.

Once Collins left the room, everyone else naturally returned to their own separate conversations and breakfasts. You threw away your plastic stir stick, grabbed your hot coffee along with a granola bar from the snack cabinet, and made your way back down the quiet hallway to your desk.

In front of you, your large monitor displayed the digital files and sprawling reports of the specific case you were currently assigned to. As always, the physical mountain of unorganized paperwork sitting on the side of your desk greeted you like a demanding old friend.

On paper, this case looked like nothing special. At least, that was how everyone else in the division chose to see it.

Officially, the file was logged under the internal Bureau designation:

Operation: Broken Mirror

According to the standard administrative brief, the file concerned the illegal trafficking of fragmented viral samples through localized black-market networks. It was a broad, systemic problem that the DSO, the FBI, and several international agencies had been dealing with for years.

To understand the logistics of the case, you had to look at how these underground networks operated. Most of the viral samples recovered during recent customs raids, port seizures, and warehouse stings were incomplete, highly degraded, or unviable. They often contained only trace amounts of known bio-organic agents, rendered useless for a mass-casualty attack but highly valuable as research samples for rogue scientists. Annoyingly, the quantities were so small and the samples were degraded, individual field offices treated them as isolated incidents. They were simply added to the ever-growing, generic pile of cases involving low-level smugglers, rogue researchers, and opportunistic criminals trying to turn a quick profit from leftover bioweapons.

But after three weeks of intensely reviewing the comprehensive data, you had begun to notice a highly sophisticated pattern that the other analysts had overlooked.

Undercover agents across multiple global agencies had spent years slowly infiltrating buyers and suppliers, posing as illegal brokers and wealthy investors while carefully documenting every transaction and tracing complex financial records. Joint operations with local international authorities had resulted in dozens of high-profile arrests across Europe, Southeast Asia, and South America. Warehouses had been raided, active laboratories had been shut down, and entire local smuggling routes had been systematically dismantled.

Yet, every single one of those separate investigations seemed to reach the exact same operational point before abruptly stopping.

The people being arrested at the borders or in the warehouses were never the ones actually manufacturing or cultivating the biological material. They were always middlemen, independent couriers, or localized brokers. They were people hired through heavily encrypted forums and anonymous, untraceable accounts who often knew little more than the next anonymous person in the smuggling chain.

Furthermore, the financial logistics were perfectly insulated. Payments were routed through a labyrinth of phantom shell companies and untraceable cryptocurrency wallets that completely disappeared within days of a transaction. Shipping manifests contained entirely false destinations and forged corporate identities. Even when investigators managed to seize communication records from confiscated burner phones, they usually found nothing but dead-end email addresses and encrypted routing numbers.

It was almost as if someone had deliberately, brilliantly designed the entire global operation with structural firewalls to prevent investigators from ever tracing the supply line back to its primary source. This was precisely what bothered you so much. Despite originating from entirely different countries, involving entirely different criminal organizations, and targeting completely unrelated buyers, every single investigation somehow ended with the exact same frustrating conclusion.

Nobody knew where the raw viral samples were actually coming from. There was no listed manufacturer, no identifiable central supplier, nor any known bio-terrorist organization claiming responsibility for the supply.

Literally nothing.

Which made absolutely no logical sense. In the world of bioterrorism, highly volatile viral samples did not simply appear out of thin air. Someone with massive infrastructure had to be actively producing them, maintaining their temperature-controlled stability, and transporting them across international waters, and most likely, someone very powerful was using and making an enormous amount of money ensuring they safely reached the right buyers.

Your monitor displayed the compiled evidence gathered over the years. Photographs from recent port raids showed confiscated glass vials containing trace amounts of the notorious C-Virus, the highly dangerous pathogen responsible for global terror events years prior. Shipping manifests recovered from seized cargo containers sat beside complex transaction histories and international financial records. There were autopsy reports of low-level couriers, surveillance photographs from international docks, and a list of local informants who had either mysteriously disappeared or turned up dead before they could ever testify in front of a federal grand jury.

Most investigators saw a messy collection of unrelated, small-time incidents but for you, these were clearly the fragmented pieces of something much larger, a single hidden pipeline spanning the globe.

The most recent and alarming addition to the file involved an undercover operative stationed in Hong Kong. His assignment had been simple and routine. He was to infiltrate a specific marine transit network suspected of facilitating the movement of biological materials through East Asia. For nearly eight months, his transmitted intelligence reports had been entirely routine, offering minor names and small-time logistics.

Then, all communication suddenly stopped. There had been no distress signal transmitted, nor any emergency extraction request logged. Just absolute, dead silence.

Three days after his disappearance, a heavily corrupted, fragmented transmission was automatically recovered from one of his automated backup channels. Most of the data file had been completely lost or destroyed during transmission.

Most of the transmission was entirely unrecoverable. Only a single line of text remained intact:

Lanshiang, China

2013

That was all. There had been no accompanying explanation as to what those specific parameters could possibly mean, and no other additional notes could be recovered from his server. Those brief, cryptic words had eventually landed the case file right onto your desk. Truthfully, nobody else in your division thought much of it.

Lanshiang had already been investigated extensively by international task forces after the catastrophic C-Virus outbreak back in 2013. Derek Simmons, the corrupt National Security Advisor who had orchestrated the attack, was dead. Neo-Umbrella, the bio-terrorist organization responsible, had been thoroughly dismantled and scattered to the wind. International inquiries had been formally conducted, massive final reports had been written, and the surviving records had long since been moved to archive databases.

As far as everyone else in the Bureau was concerned, the historical matter of Lanshiang had been settled years ago.

Case closed.

At least, that was what everyone desperately wanted to believe. And yet, something about those two lines continued to deeply bother you. Because the deeper you dug into seemingly unrelated, modern smuggling investigations, the more often those exact same three words covertly resurfaced in the metadata. Some involved a highly suspicious bank transfer linked to a shell company, a damaged hard drive recovered during a random raid in Singapore, the sudden disappearance of a port informant in Macau, or an encrypted message intercepted by intelligence in Eastern Europe. All of these cases were entirely different, expanding across different years and involving entirely different people, but somehow, their digital breadcrumbs all covertly pointed and referred back to the exact same place and date:

Lanshiang, China

2013

Again, and again, and again. Eventually, the repeating pattern forced your investigation toward the one thing modern federal investigators hated dealing with most: old, closed cases.

Specifically, you needed to look into the chaotic final weeks of the 2013 C-Virus outbreak to understand what had truly happened in the aftermath. Unfortunately, revisiting those historic events digitally proved to be nearly impossible. Many of the original records had been permanently classified under maximum national security protocols. Others had been so heavily, aggressively redacted by intelligence agencies that entire pages consisted of nothing but solid black bars and missing paragraphs. Some files simply no longer existed in the main frame, their contents listed as completely lost or destroyed during the chaotic administrative aftermath of the outbreak. Witness statements directly contradicted one another, timelines were severely fractured, and entire sections of physical evidence appeared to have vanished from the system entirely.

Despite spending the last three weeks trying to convince your superiors that there was something massive hidden beneath all the digital dead ends and missing pages, their administrative response never changed.

"Agent, Simmons is dead."

"Neo-Umbrella is gone."

"Don't waste Bureau time chasing ghosts."

You let out a small, tired sigh and took another slow sip of your lukewarm coffee as you leaned back in your squeaking office chair, thinking that maybe, just maybe, they were absolutely right. Maybe there really wasn't anything there. Maybe you were just wasting your time on a wild goose chase.

Still... you couldn't shake the nagging feeling that someone, somewhere high up in the system, had worked very hard to bury whatever had actually happened in China back in 2013. After working for the FBI for five years, having been recruited into an analytical track straight out of college when you were just twenty-one, there were obvious, predictable patterns of criminal behavior and systemic cover-up motives that you had sharp eyes for. You understood a fundamental truth about power and bureaucracy: people usually only bury things when they are absolutely terrified of what others might find if they look too closely.

"You're still working on that thing?"

The familiar, casual voice caused you to glance up from your glowing monitor to see Agent Daniel Gallagher, a fellow agent that joined the Bureau the same time as you, leaning heavily against the fabric divider separating your cubicle from his. A steaming cup of coffee sat in his right hand, while his left hand rested lazily in his slacks pocket. Unlike your exhausted state, Daniel somehow looked far too awake for someone who had only clocked into the building twenty minutes ago, which honestly annoyed you slightly considering you were already halfway through your second cup of coffee and still fundamentally contemplating the meaning of your life.

You let out a quiet, tired sigh. "Good morning to you, too."

Daniel chuckled, taking a sip from his mug. "So that's a definite yes."

Taking another sip of your own coffee, you rubbed at your straining eyes and leaned back slightly in your chair, keeping your gaze fixed on your monitors as you scrolled through the pages to show Daniel the ridiculous, insulting amount of black bars stretching across the text of the official files.

"It's been three solid weeks and I've gotten virtually nowhere," you admitted candidly. "Well... not nowhere, exactly."

Daniel raised an eyebrow, shifting his weight. "Oh?"

"I found another concrete connection." Setting your coffee down on a coaster, you turned one of your monitors slightly toward his side of the cubicle, displaying several international reports side by side for comparison.

"It's always the exact same thing, Daniel. Different cases. Different years. Completely different people. Yet somehow, if you map out the logistics, they all lead right back to Lanshiang in 2013."

Daniel frowned slightly, his casual demeanor slipping as his eyes scanned the data. "Again?"

"Again," you confirmed firmly.

"And the online database records are completely useless," you continued with a frustrated, heavy sigh, gesturing broadly at the screen. "Every file involving the immediate aftermath of the outbreak is so heavily redacted by the upper echelons that I can't make heads or tails of the timeline. Half the pages are just solid black ink and missing paragraphs. I swear, whoever classified these things was personally, deeply offended by transparency."

That earned a genuine chuckle from Daniel. He shook his head, taking another slow sip of his coffee. "Welcome to the United States federal government."

"No kidding." You shook your head right along with him, letting out a faint chuckle of your own.

"I understand keeping active tactical methods or informant identities classified for safety, but this?" You gestured aggressively toward the screen. "Entire legal sections are completely missing. It almost feels like somebody intentionally, meticulously went through these servers and manually scrubbed anything remotely useful."

Daniel remained quiet for a moment, his eyes scanning over the stark lines and lines of black bars on your screen, resting on the occasional unredacted words that meant absolutely nothing out of context.

"Yeah..." he murmured softly.

You looked over at him, catching the shift in his tone. "Yeah?"

He gave a slight shrug, looking down at his coffee. "Nothing."

"No, come on," you pressed, turning fully in your chair. "You had a look. What are you thinking?"

Daniel hesitated, looking around the quiet hallway before scratching the back of his head. "It's just... the whole historical narrative after China has always been weird."

"Weird how, exactly?"

Daniel rolled over the spare rolling chair sitting just beside your desk and sat down, leaning his elbows on his knees. "Look, everyone in the law enforcement community knows about Tall Oaks."

He motioned vaguely with his coffee cup to emphasize his point. "Everyone knows about Simmons and Neo-Umbrella. Hell, they cover all of that extensively during our initial training at Quantico. They cover President Benford's tragic assassination, the weaponized fog outbreak, Simmons being directly responsible for the treason, all of that standard textbook stuff."

You nodded, listening intently. "Right..."

"But the immediate aftermath in China?" Daniel gave a small shrug, though there was something oddly thoughtful and serious in his expression now. The easy, morning humor from earlier had completely faded away. "Nobody in the upper circles really talks about it."

You frowned, leaning forward. "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean exactly that." Daniel leaned back in the rolling chair, absently turning his coffee cup between his hands. "You hear stories. Bits and pieces from the older guys on the tactical squads. But nobody really knows what actually happened on the ground after Simmons was officially defeated."

That caused you to completely pause, your mind racing. "What?"

Daniel nodded, his brows lifting slightly as if he understood exactly how strange that sounded to an analytical mind. "Seriously... There are official summary reports in the system, sure. But most of them are incredibly vague as hell, and what little information there is has been buried under enough security redactions to make you wonder if the bureaucrats writing them were being paid directly by the black marker industry."

That earned a small, dry laugh from you. "But there had to be high-level field agents involved in a cleanup of that scale, right?" you asked.

"There were," Daniel nodded seriously. "A lot of them, actually... And one of the primary agents on the ground was Leon S. Kennedy."

At the explicit mention of that name, you blinked. Of course you knew exactly who Leon S. Kennedy was. Practically everyone in the federal government knew who he was; you'd have to live under a literal rock not to know his name. The man was a towering, mythical legend among federal agents and international operatives alike. He was a survivor of the horrific 1998 Raccoon City disaster, a former specialized secret agent directly under the President, a close personal friend of the late President Benford, and the list of his accomplishments went on and on.

He was the man who had spent nearly twenty years throwing himself headfirst into every unimaginable bioterrorism crisis across the globe. Hell, there were enough wild stories floating around the FBI and DSO bullpens regarding his missions to fill an entire library, and honestly, some of them sounded so ridiculous and cinematic that they couldn't possibly be true.

One veteran field agent swore up and down that Leon had held off an entire massive horde of infected by himself using nothing but tactical positioning and a knife. Another analyst claimed he hadn't taken a proper, valid vacation in over his entire twenty years of continuous service. And honestly? That last one you fully believed.

There had been countless little conversations over stale, lukewarm coffee and cheap vending machine snacks in the breakroom where older, graying agents would casually bring his name up. They didn't do it in the flashy way people talked about celebrities or comic book heroes, but almost like they were respectfully talking about a deeply admired old friend.

You still vividly remembered overhearing Agent Ramirez talking about his time working alongside some D.S.O. operatives years ago, and how Leon had once personally helped him carry heavy tactical equipment after a grueling mission because, according to Ramirez, "the guy was just too damn nice to let anyone else do all the heavy lifting alone."

Nobody in the room had laughed at the story, nor had anyone called him a liar or thought the story was made up. They had all simply nodded respectfully and continued eating their sandwiches, as though that behavior sounded exactly like something Leon S. Kennedy would do without a second thought.

One particularly drunk senior analyst during the department Christmas party last year had tearfully and loudly described him as, quote, "the nicest, most dedicated bastard you'll ever meet in this corrupt city," to which literally everyone in the room had nodded in solemn agreement.

From what you had gathered over your five years, Leon Kennedy was deeply respected by just about everyone, spanning from high-level field operators to entry-level analysts across the DSO, the FOS, the FBI, hell, even the meticulous people working in accounting in all those separate branches seemed to know exactly who he was and what he stood for.

Though... what people remembered most vividly wasn't just his unparalleled tactical accomplishments. Instead, it was his sudden, mysterious death.

Truthfully... you had always felt a profound sense of sadness for him. And it wasn't simply because he was famous or some highly decorated government hero, even though he undeniably was. It was because he had devoted nearly his entire adult life to protecting complete strangers from biological nightmares, sacrificing any semblance of a normal life.

Sadly, in the end... nobody outside of the highest security clearances even knew what had actually happened to him. There were no real public answers, nor was there any sense of closure provided to the people who were closest to him in the field. His sudden disappearance had just become another highly classified, closed report buried beneath a massive mountain of government secrets.

Daniel's expression softened slightly, his voice growing quieter now with absolutely no sense of joking left behind it. "My old supervisor used to work directly with some high-ranking DSO people back then. He told me Leon's sudden death hit everyone in the intelligence community incredibly hard... He was kind of the guy everyone looked up to when things went sideways."

Daniel chuckled softly, though there wasn't any real humor behind it. "Apparently, his long-time handler, who had been with him through almost every major mission for years, didn't leave her locked office for two solid days when the K.I.A. notice came through."

You frowned, a heavy feeling settling in your chest. "What exactly happened to him out there?"

Daniel gave a helpless shrug, his face twisting slightly in professional frustration. "Nobody knows the true specifics at all... Officially, the record states it was a routine, classified follow-up operation shortly after the China outbreak wrapped up. They were tracking down a lead."

That answer didn't sit right with your analytical brain. There were still so many glaring questions racing through your mind. "But what was the specific mission objective? Was there anyone else assigned to the team with him?"

"No clue whatsoever... I wish I had a real answer for you, but the file just says he went out and never came back," Daniel sighed heavily, taking another slow sip of his coffee. "They recovered just enough circumstantial evidence in the field to formally declare him KIA (killed in action), and that was that. Processed, archived, and forgotten."

For a long moment, neither of you spoke. Daniel simply stared deeply into his coffee mug, while you found yourself looking back at the redacted files blinking on your monitor. You couldn't help but feel terribly sorry for him. He had been a living legend amongst the government branches, a man whose stories kept young agents motivated, but you felt sorry not for the legendary ending, but more so for the actual man himself behind it all. He had lived a life entirely dedicated to protecting people from the dark... He deserved so much better than disappearing completely into history with no answers.

"...That's just awful," you quietly murmured into the quiet cubicle.

Daniel nodded slowly. "Yeah... It really is."

A heavy silence settled between the two of you, and the usual background noise of the busy office, the phones ringing, the keyboards clacking, they all seemed strangely distant for a brief moment.

Then, Daniel suddenly blinked, his eyes widening slightly as a thought struck him. "...Wait a minute."

You looked over at him, noticing the sudden shift. "What?"

He sat up straighter in the chair, his eyes lighting up. "You know..." he began slowly, pointing upward with his coffee cup toward the ceiling, "back in 2013, most of this specific division still heavily relied on physical archives."

You looked over, your brow furrowing. "Hm?"

"Everything wasn't fully digital back then," Daniel explained, his voice gaining traction. "A lot of stuff got manually transferred over to the main servers over the years as technology updated, but a lot of things slipped through the cracks during the migration. You know how the bureaucracy is."

You snorted in agreement. "We lose enough physical paperwork annually to start our own underground black market."

Daniel laughed loudly. "Exactly! My point is..." He pointed down the long hallway toward the back of the floor. "There might be original physical files, raw field notes, or unredacted evidence logs down there that never actually made it into the digital database update."

That caused you to sharply raise an eyebrow, a spark of real hope hitting your chest. "Are you serious?"

"Hey, it's definitely worth a shot," Daniel said. Then, a massive, mischievous grin slowly spread across his face. "Though..." He paused dramatically, clearly trying his best not to laugh out loud, "didn't Collins spend the entire morning swearing the archive room is haunted?"

You stared at him completely flatly.

Daniel stared back, maintaining a deadpan expression for three seconds before promptly bursting out laughing.

"I'm totally kidding!" He paused, wiping a tear from his eye, then smirked, raising an eyebrow at you teasingly. "Mostly."

You rolled your eyes, letting out a huff. "You're an absolute ass, Daniel."

"I know I am."

Still chuckling quietly to himself, he stood up from the spare chair and grabbed his coffee mug. "But seriously... if there's anything left from the unredacted 2013 files... it'll probably be down there."

Down in the exact same dark storage closet Agent Collins had spent the entire morning swearing was haunted by a ghost.

Truthfully, the thought alone almost made you laugh as Daniel walked away. Somehow, despite all the genuinely horrifying, biological things your division dealt with on a regular basis, everyone had still managed to spend a good twenty minutes discussing supernatural ghosts over morning coffee and breakfast. You could still perfectly picture Collins' deeply offended expression as he desperately defended his sanity from the relentless ridicule of everyone in the breakroom. The poor guy had looked genuinely, deeply bothered by whatever experience he had down there, which in itself was highly unusual. Seasoned federal agents didn't exactly get shaken up over standard campfire ghost stories.

Yet, as ridiculous as the entire conversation had been, you found yourself involuntarily remembering the specific details Collins had described earlier. The sudden, strange coldness; the heavy, uneasy feeling of being watched; the distinct physical sensation that someone was standing right behind his neck; and of course, the moving archive box.

You quietly shook your head at the thought, clicking your mouse. Ghosts... Right. As if.

After five years of working with the Bureau, you had seen enough real-world horrors to know that there was almost always a perfectly logical, scientific explanation for absolutely everything. Most things ordinary people considered supernatural or paranormal usually boiled down to extreme stress, psychological exhaustion, poor basement lighting, or in Collins' specific case, surviving off four hours of sleep and unhealthy, massive amounts of caffeine.

Still... as your eyes drifted away from your monitor and toward the long hallway leading deeper into the back of the building, which eventually went down to the old archives, you couldn't help but feel slightly curious. Not because of a silly ghost story, of course, but because old, physical archives meant old, unscrubbed records. And old records meant things that people forgot about over time... or perhaps, things that people in high places intentionally wanted completely forgotten.

The thought suddenly made you remember a piece of advice your old field supervisor had once told you during your very first year with the Bureau. At the time, you had been helping him investigate a massive corruption case involving a prominent local politician, and you had spent weeks completely frustrated over missing reports, heavily redacted memos, and conveniently misplaced physical evidence.

You could still perfectly picture him leaning back in his creaking chair, looking at your frustration, and telling you with a tired, knowing laugh:

"People only bury things when they're afraid of what others might find."

At the time, you hadn't thought much of it, chalking it up to standard law enforcement cynicism. But after five years with the FBI, you had come to realize just how profoundly true those words actually were.

People buried mistakes to protect their careers. People buried secrets to protect their reputations. People buried crimes to stay out of federal prison. And sometimes... People buried entire, massive truths to protect the status quo.

Which was exactly why the more everyone in management explicitly told you to let the case go and move on, the more it deeply bothered your gut. Maybe there really was absolutely nothing down there, or it could just be that three continuous weeks of staring at glowing monitors and black redaction bars had simply made you entirely paranoid.

Or maybe... someone, somewhere, had worked very hard to ensure that whatever happened after Lanshiang in 2013 remained completely buried in the dark. If there was even the slightest, smallest chance that a raw, unredacted physical file had slipped through the electronic cracks... you fully intended to find it. Even if that meant spending your overtime evening digging through a supposedly haunted basement storage closet.

"Hmmm... I'll take a look down there later today," you sighed aloud to yourself, sinking a bit lower into your office chair. You pulled your keyboard closer to plan out your day. "I just need to organize my current notes first and try to plan out a cohesive timeline before I go digging..."

Daniel, hearing you from across the divider, let out another chuckle. "Alright, you have fun with that, Agent. Just do me a favor and don't come into the bullpen possessed tomorrow morning," he joked, sliding his rolling desk chair completely back into his own cubicle space.

In response, you playfully grabbed the nearest stray eraser on your desk and chucked it right over the divider at him, smiling as you heard it bounce off his cubicle wall.

—

Five years.

To a living, breathing person, five years was a clearly measurable, tangible chunk of time. It was a period that could easily be mapped out by the steady accumulation of life’s milestones, whether it be climbing the corporate ladder, watching the younger members of your family grow up, changing your personal style, moving into apartments with better natural light, or keeping up with whatever television drama was currently capturing the public's attention. But to the spirit of Leon S. Kennedy, time had become a fluid, it was slippery, and had become an entirely meaningless echo.

Without a physical heartbeat to anchor his consciousness to the steady, mechanical ticking of the clocks on the office walls, days bled seamlessly into weeks. Months completely dissolved into years until the passage of time felt less like a moving river and more like a stagnant, frozen puddle he was permanently trapped in. He didn't sleep, he didn't eat, and he certainly didn't breathe because as a ghost those aren’t things he needed at all. He just... Existed.

In the very beginning, the sheer panic of his condition had been all consuming. Back in 2013, he had died at 36 years old, it was cynical, battle-weary, and he had been carrying an agonizing amount of emotional baggage. He had spent his final days on Earth watching the world burn, forced to pull the trigger on his close friend, President Adam Benford, and fighting through the blood soaked streets of Lanshiang. He had been exhausted down to his very bones. But when death finally claimed him, it hadn't brought peace, instead, it had brought a terrifying, invisible isolation.

He had spent the first few months of his afterlife in a frantic, screaming rage. He tried to shatter glass cups off tables, slammed his hands against walls, and did anything to force someone, anyone, to acknowledge that he hadn't just vanished off the face of the earth. He had traveled across the country to see the people who mattered most. He had stood directly in Ingrid Hunnigan’s private office, screaming her name until his phantom throat felt raw and torn, entirely forced to watch her tearfully package his personal desk effects into brown cardboard boxes. He had sat right on the edge of Chris Redfield’s desk, watching the battle hardened BSAA captain stare blankly into a glass of amber scotch, looking older, more broken, and more tired than Leon had ever seen him in life. He had even tracked down Claire, standing right beside her in a bustling, loud NGO office, reaching out a hand to touch her shoulder for comfort, only for his fingers to pass right through her like cold smoke through a screen door.

They couldn’t see him. They couldn’t hear him. They couldn’t feel him.

Eventually, the desperate, screaming rage had slowly dulled into a numbing, heavy acceptance. You couldn't spend eternity throwing a useless tantrum in an empty room. So, Leon did what he had always done best throughout his turbulent life… He adapted.

Strangely enough, the absolute isolation became a twisted kind of blessing. For fifteen years, Leon’s mind had been a hyper vigilant war zone, constantly calculating survival rates, bullet counts, and casualty lists. But as a ghost, the global threats were no longer his problem. He didn't have to carry the weight of the world anymore. His only fight was against his own consciousness which had become a daily battle to keep his mind sharp and prevent himself from fading into the void. Freed from the crushing stress of being mankind's protector, the grim, fatalistic armor he had worn in 2013 began to crack. The heavy, somber agent who had survived Lanshiang slowly dissolved, allowing the younger, more relaxed version of himself to resurface. The playful charm and dry, sarcastic wit of his twenties which involved the classic one-liners he used to throw around just to keep his spirits up, it had all come back to him. He was a ghost, yes, but he felt more like Leon than he had in a decade.

Over those five long years of trial and error, he had slowly figured out the strange, unwritten laws of this new metaphysical existence.

First and foremost, he learned that humans were an absolute no touch zone. He couldn't lay a finger on a living person, and they couldn't touch him, any attempt to grab someone or block their path resulted in him slipping right through them like cold mist. It was a rule that extended to almost every living thing, with a few bizarre exceptions. Animals, as it turned out, possessed a keen, uncanny sixth sense that humans lacked. Leon had spent hours wandering the streets of Washington D.C., discovering that stray cats would arch their backs and hiss as he walked past, and police K-9 units would tilt their heads, tracking his exact movements through the crowded lobbies. They could see him clearly, their wide eyes locking onto his translucent form, though they still couldn't physically interact with him. It amused him to no end as it proved the old wives' tale true that pets could see the supernatural.

Solid, inanimate matter, however, was a completely different story. If he didn't pay attention, Leon would naturally drift right through solid walls, steel doors, and concrete floors as if they were made of nothing but air. It was a handy trick for getting into highly classified government buildings without a security badge, but it made him feel completely unmoored from reality. To fight the feeling of being entirely hollow, Leon had spent years training his mind to interact with the physical world. He discovered that if he focused all his willpower, channeling a sharp burst of mental concentration into a localized area, he could briefly anchor his spiritual energy to solid objects.

In the beginning, he could barely manage to make a single piece of printer paper flutter. But with a lot of practice and sheer boredom, he had gradually built up his ghostly strength. Now, he could deliberately press down on a light switch, nudge a coffee mug, or slide a file across a desk. It took effort, and it always left him feeling a bit drained afterward, but it was his only way of proving to himself that he could still leave a footprint on the world.

Without much else to do to occupy his endless consciousness, he naturally fell into a daily routine, gravitating toward the familiar, busy halls of government agencies like the DSO and the FBI. It provided a strange sort of professional comfort. He would wander through the rows of cubicles, leaning casually over analysts' shoulders to read ongoing investigation reports, or sitting right on top of conference tables during high-level briefings about the latest black-market viral strains.

Over the years, the absolute silence of his isolation had given birth to a rather stubborn habit of talking out loud to himself. Since no one else was ever going to converse with him, he might as well be his own sounding board. He'd offer sarcastic, muttered commentary on poorly written field reports, criticize the tactical entry plans of overeager SWAT teams, and make dry, witty jokes that absolutely no one would ever hear or laugh at. It was a lonely, hollow existence, but to Leon, it was still far better than fading away entirely.

Which brought him directly to earlier this morning.

Leon had been lounging comfortably on the arm of the breakroom couch, ankles crossed, when Agent Collins had marched in, practically vibrating with sheer indignation. Leon, as it turned out, had been the exact one who followed Collins down into the fourth-floor archive storage the night before, mostly out of sheer, unadulterated boredom. Watching Collins completely jump out of his skin when Leon had concentrated all his willpower to lean his weight against a stack of files, causing one upper box to shift barely an inch on the metal shelf, it had honestly been the absolute highlight of Leon's entire week.

As Collins now stood in the center of the breakroom, wildly brandishing a plastic fork and fiercely defending his sanity to a room full of laughing agents, Leon stood right next to him, crossing his arms and practically doubling over with silent laughter at the spectacle.

"A rat isn't moving a thirty-pound archive box, Murphy!" Collins snapped to the room, his face turning a bright, embarrassing shade of red.

"Damn right it wasn't a rat, buddy," Leon chimed in instantly, tossing a classic, spectral smirk toward the laughing agents, his deep voice echoing only in his own phantom ears. He leaned in close to Collins' ear, whispering, "It was THE Leon S. Kennedy. Show some respect to the supernatural. Next time, I'm hiding your stapler."

When the breakroom finally cleared out and the entertainment ended, Leon casually drifted down the hallway, trailing lazily behind the agents as they returned to their respective cubicles.

As he walked, his lips moved in a faint, silent murmur, a continuation of a conversation that only he was participating in. Over the last five years, the crushing, absolute silence of his isolation had given birth to a rather stubborn habit of talking out loud to himself. In the beginning, it had started as a desperate psychological anchor, a coping mechanism to keep from losing his mind in a world where he had no voice. When you spend months on end without a single soul acknowledging your presence, your own voice becomes the only proof that you haven't entirely dissolved into nothingness.

Eventually, the habit evolved from a survival tactic into his primary source of entertainment. Since no one else was ever going to converse with him, he might as well be his own sounding board. He had essentially become a one man audience to the daily drama of the Bureau. He'd offer sarcastic, muttered commentary on poorly written field reports, criticize the tactical entry plans of overeager SWAT teams, and make dry, witty jokes that absolutely no one would ever hear or laugh at. It was a lonely, hollow way to live, but to Leon, keeping up a steady stream of internal and external dialogue was far better than fading away entirely into the dark void of nothingness. It kept him grounded. It kept him… Himself.

His eyes swept over the busy, chaotic bullpen, past the humming copiers and ringing phones, until they landed directly on you.

He’d seen you around the office before, of course. You were a permanent fixture in the bioterrorism division, usually completely buried behind a literal fortress of physical paperwork that looked entirely too heavy for your small desk. He had passed by your cubicle a few times over the past several months, occasionally lingering for a second or two to observe the sheer, radiating exhaustion weighing down your shoulders.

He knew from observation that you were meticulous. He knew you took the horrific details of the job straight to heart, and he could see it in the slight, troubled tightening of your jaw whenever you reviewed autopsy photographs from bioweapon attacks. It was a specific look he knew intimately. It was the look of someone who still cared about the victims, someone who hadn't let the cold bureaucracy of the Bureau turn their heart to stone yet. In a building full of people who viewed casualties as simple statistics on a spreadsheet, you actually looked at the faces in the photos. He respected that. More than you would ever know.

Though today, as he drifted past the fabric divider of your cubicle, something on your screen caught his eye. Leon leaned over your shoulder, his translucent form hovering just inches from your back, his face close enough that a living man would have felt the chill of his presence. He fully expected to see the usual dry financial data, boring shipping manifests, or routine tax audits.

Instead, his ghostly blue eyes widened slightly in absolute shock as he read the bold, stark text blinking on your monitor:

Lansiang, China

2013

Leon’s breath caught, or rather, the phantom memory of a physical breath caught sharply in his chest. His gaze flicked rapidly down your page, taking in the heavy black redaction bars, the chopped-up operational timelines, and the name Derek Simmons. A sudden, heavy wave of intense nostalgia and deeply buried, unresolved tension coiled tightly in his gut. It was his case. His death. The final curtain call of his living life, laid out on a monitor in a cramped FBI cubicle five years later.

"Well, sweetheart," Leon murmured softly, a bittersweet, melancholic smile touching his lips as he watched you let out a heavy huff and rub your tired eyes. "I hate to break it to you, but you're actively digging up a grave that the government spent millions of dollars pouring solid concrete over."

He watched intently as your fingers flew across the keyboard, carefully organizing scattered files into a cohesive digital timeline, completely unaware of the legendary ghost currently haunting your workspace. He watched the subtle play of frustration across your face, the way your eyebrows knit together in sheer, stubborn determination. Everyone else in this building was actively telling you to let it go. They were telling you to stop chasing a dead man's case.

And yet, here you were, completely refusing to back down.

"You're stubborn, I'll give you that," Leon said softly, a genuine spark of warmth flickering in his chest for the first time in five long years. It wasn't just a fleeting feeling, but instead, it felt like a tiny ember being struck in the dark.

He watched you grab a stray sticky notepad, quickly scribbling down a physical reminder to check the old fourth floor archives later that evening. A slow, boyish smirk gradually spread across Leon’s handsome face. The archive room. The exact same cold, creepy room he had just used to terrify Agent Collins the night before.

"Looks like I've officially got a date in the storage room tonight," Leon chuckled quietly to himself, running a spectral hand through his perpetually messy blonde hair as he stood up from your desk. He watched you take another determined, deep gulp of your lukewarm coffee, a newfound sense of excitement buzzing through his spirit. "Don't keep me waiting, Agent. Let's see just how good your investigative skills really are."

—

The thick, heavy silence of the fourth-floor archive room was broken only by the low, hypnotic hum of the flickering fluorescent lights overhead. Tucked away at the very end of a labyrinth of windowless concrete hallways, the room was a miserable excuse for a workspace. You stepped further into the aisle, immediately shivering as the ambient temperature plummeted. It smelled faintly of damp dust, deteriorating cardboard, old ink, and decades of forgotten, stagnant bureaucracy.

Just as Agent Collins had aggressively complained over his breakfast earlier that morning, the room was absolutely freezing. You pulled the edges of your cardigan tighter around your shoulders, your eyes scanning the imposing metal rows. Your sole focus was finding those files. Everyone above had told you to drop it, but the nagging discrepancies in the Lanshiang timeline had brought you down here, entirely determined to unearth whatever the Bureau had tried to bury.

Leon sat cross-legged atop one of the rusted metal shelving units, his translucent back resting casually against a heavy stack of unfiled federal tax records from the late nineties. He leaned his chin lazily in his hand, his piercing blue eyes tracking your every move with a mixture of quiet amusement and intense curiosity as you navigated the narrow, shadowy aisles below.

"I told you so, sweetheart," Leon murmured, a dry, spectral chuckle slipping from his lips. He ran a hand through his messy blonde hair, watching you visibly shudder against the chill. "Should’ve listened to Collins. The drafts down here are brutal. Though, I guess you wouldn't be an FBI agent if you actually listened to warnings."

He had been following you ever since you left your cubicle on the upper floor. For a ghost who had spent the last five years drowning in a sea of absolute, mind-numbing boredom, a stubborn analyst digging into the exact events that defined his life, and apparently, his mysterious death, was the most exciting thing to happen in half a decade.

Leon leaned his upper body forward, hovering precariously over the edge of the high metal shelf as you finally stopped in front of the section marked:

2013 - International Incidents

Tilting your head back, you squinted at the high shelves, your breath pluming faintly like a cloud of white vapor in the freezing closet air.

Leon leaned his upper body forward, hovering precariously over the edge of the high metal shelf as your eyes scanned the faded, handwritten labels until they locked onto a heavily taped, dusty cardboard box wedged tightly onto the very top shelf.

Lanshiang: Sub-Outbreak Data

Leon’s casual, teasing demeanor faltered for a split second. A sudden, heavy shadow crossed his handsome features. One of the unique, bizarre perks of his specific ghostly condition was that his spirit maintained the exact physical age he had been when he died, which was 36. Even though five long years had passed since his disappearance, meaning he technically should have been 41 by now, his reflectionless form remained frozen in the prime of his mid-thirties.

Lanshiang.

Even as a spirit, the mere mention of that name sent a profound, phantom chill straight down his spine. He looked from the box down to you, watching you push yourself up onto the very tips of your toes, stretching your arms as high as they could possibly go. Your fingertips barely brushed the rough, dusty edge of the cardboard.

You let out a frustrated huff, straining your muscles as you reached. You hated how poorly designed these old storage rooms were. Why did the most important files always have to be placed out of arm's reach?

"You're a little short for this ride, aren't you?" Leon teased, a familiar boyish smirk returning to his face as he shifted his weight, effortlessly floating down from the top of the unit to hover right beside you in the cramped aisle. He crossed his arms over his chest, tilting his head as he watched you struggle. "Come on, Agent. You're with the Bureau. Use some tactical ingenuity. Grab a chair. Or, you know, just keep stretching. From where I'm standing, it’s highly entertaining."

You couldn't hear his jokes, but you could certainly feel the frustration building in your chest. Deciding you had stretched enough, you firmly hooked your fingers around the bottom edge of the container and gave the stuck box a hard, determined yank.

Leon’s eyes widened instantly because from his elevated vantage point, he saw what your limited perspective couldn't. There was a sharp, rogue piece of rusted shelving wire that was caught firmly on the bottom seam of the cardboard. As you pulled with all your weight, the wire didn't just slide out, instead it snapped violently, pitching the heavy, thirty pound box of forgotten history straight off the edge of the top shelf.

"Whoa—hey, watch out!" Leon yelled instinctively. Driven by pure muscle memory from his years in the field, he reached out with both hands to catch the falling weight. But his fingers slid straight through the cardboard like cold smoke passing through a screen door. Even after five years as a ghost, he still occasionally struggled to interact with physical objects when caught completely off guard, requiring a deep level of concentration he simply didn't have time to muster in a split second.

There was a sharp rush of displaced air, a flash of wide-eyed panic as you looked up and realized too late that the box was free-falling directly toward your face, and then—BONK.

The heavy archive box collided squarely with the center of your forehead. The sheer force of the blunt impact knocked you completely off balance, instantly driving the breath from your lungs in a sharp gasp. Your shoes skidded uselessly on the slick linoleum floor, your arms flailed blindly in the air, and your world tilted violently sideways before your back met the hard ground with a breath-knocking, echoing thud.

The box crashed down right next to your head, exploding open upon impact and scattering classified folders, typed reports, and redacted crime scene photographs across the floor.

Leon froze in mid-air, his hands still extended where he had tried to catch the box. He stared down at your motionless form, his jaw dropping in horror. "Oh, great. Fantastic," he muttered frantically, floating down until he was hovering a mere six inches above your face. "Five years of absolutely nothing, and the second I find someone interesting, I end up killing them with a box of outbreak data. Come on, don't be dead. Wake up, please. I really don’t want to meet your ghost if that’s how this works."

You lay perfectly still for a long, agonizing minute. Your eyes were tightly shut as a blinding flash of white-hot pain throbbed behind your eyelids. Your head felt like it had been cracked open like an egg, and a dull, rhythmic ringing echoed loudly in your ears. Bringing a trembling hand up to your face, you winced as your fingers brushed against the center of your brow. A prominent red mark was already developing across your forehead where the box had struck, the clear beginning of a nasty bruise and a sizable bump.

But as the darkness swirling at the edges of your vision slowly began to recede, you realized the ringing in your ears wasn't a ringing at all.

It was a voice. A frantic, deeply masculine, and incredibly panicked voice that was far too loud to be coming from outside the room.

"Hey—hey, come on, stay with me, Agent," Leon was saying, his face twisted in genuine worry as he frantically waved his hands over your face, trying to create a draft or some kind of physical sensation to wake you up. "Please don't make me the reason an analyst gets a Darwin Award. I survived Raccoon City, the corporate greed of Umbrella, and the global collapse of Neo-Umbrella. I am not having 'involuntary manslaughter via paperwork' on my permanent afterlife record."

Your eyelids fluttered open, your vision blurry and swimming with sharp spots of light. You blinked once, then twice, trying to clear the haze.

As the room slowly came into focus, the breath caught completely in your throat.

Sitting right on his knees beside you, hovering over your fallen form with wide, panicked blue eyes, was a man. He had messy blonde hair parted down the middle, a sharp jawline, and wore a dark jacket. But he wasn't solid. The concrete floor and the scattered white papers were faintly visible right through his chest, his entire form casting a soft, ethereal glow in the dim aisle.

You scrambled backward in sheer shock, your back hitting the bottom shelf of the opposite row as you stared at him, your hand clutching your throbbing forehead.

Leon froze, his frantic pacing coming to a dead halt as he realized your eyes weren't looking through him anymore. They were locked onto his face. He blinked, slowly pointing a finger at his own chest.

"Wait," Leon stammered, his jaw dropping as a stunned, disbelieving laugh bubbled up from his chest. "Can you... can you actually see me right now?"

Leon, completely accustomed to being ignored by the living, kept right on rambling, his eyes scanning your face for signs of a severe concussion.

"Can you hear me? Look at my fingers—well, don't look at my fingers, they're kind of see-through right now, but just give me a sign you're alive so I can stop panicking. Because honestly, I don't think my heart can take this, which is ironic because I don't even have a—"

Slowly, painfully, you raised a trembling hand. Your muscles felt heavy, entirely unresponsive, but you managed to lift a single, shaking index finger, pointing it directly at his nose. Your breath stuttered in your throat as your mind violently tried to reject the reality of what your eyes were registering.

"...L-Leon... Scott… Kennedy...?"

Your voice cracked, barely a whisper, trembling as you stated his full, heavily classified government name.

Leon froze mid-sentence. His jaw went slack. He blinked once. Twice. He looked down at your pointing finger, then looked directly behind him to see if there was somehow another ghost standing in the narrow, freezing aisle, and then looked back down at you. His eyes blew wide open with absolute, staggering shock.

"Wait," Leon breathed, his deep voice cracking slightly as he pointed a finger back at his own chest, his entire posture stiffening. "You... Can you see me?"

For a solid, agonizing three seconds, the archive room fell into a dead silence. The only sound was the low, rhythmic buzz of the overhead fluorescent lights. Your heart was hammering against your ribs so violently you were certain it was going to burst. You couldn't take your eyes off him. Up close, you could see the way his form softly blurred at the edges, a faint, unnatural shimmer outlining his frame. Leon stared at your pointing finger, his translucent face frozen in an expression of sheer, unadulterated disbelief.

Then, the reality of what was happening finally crashed through his brain.

"Oh my God," Leon whispered, his eyes widening to the size of saucers. A frantic, stunned energy took over his features. "You can see me."

Your brain, already severely compromised by the thirty pound box of data that had just scrambled your gray matter, short-circuited entirely. A dead man, a literal national hero who had been formally declared KIA five years ago, was currently floating six inches above your face, staring at you like you were an absolute anomaly. Panic surged through your veins like a shot of pure adrenaline, cold and paralyzing. This was impossible. It was a hallucination. Maybe you were having a brain hemorrhage from the impact.

The sheer absurdity and terror of the moment finally broke through your physical paralysis.

"GHOST! AHHHHHH!" you shrieked.

The scream tore from your throat, loud and piercing enough to wake the dead, which, technically, it already had. Scrambling backward like a terrified crab, your shoes skidded wildly against the linoleum as you tried to put as much physical distance between yourself and the hovering apparition as humanly possible. Your limbs flailed, kicking up a storm of scattered papers and classified reports as you desperately retreated down the narrow aisle.

Leon, startled by the sheer, ear-splitting volume of your voice, jumped backward in mid-air, letting out a distinctly unheroic yelp of his own.

"Whoa! Hey! Stop screaming! Shut up, shut up, you're gonna bring the whole damn night shift down here!"

He frantically waved his hands in a downward motion, dropping down to his knees on the floor, or rather, hovering a millimeter above it, as he desperately tried to quiet you down. His hands were shaking, a look of pure, chaotic panic taking over his handsome face as he looked toward the heavy archive door, terrified your screams would echo down the concrete hallway.

"Get away from me!" you yelled, your back hitting the base of the opposite metal shelving unit with a hard, metallic rattle that vibrated through your spine.

You were trapped. The aisle was too narrow, and he was blocking your only clear path to the door. Panicking, your hand swung out blindly, searching for a weapon, a shield, just anything to defend yourself against the specter. Your open palm collided squarely with the center of his chest.

You expected your hand to pass right through him like cold fog. Instead, your palm hit something solid. It felt like striking a wall of dense, sculpted ice. A massive shockwave of freezing, static electricity shot straight up your arm, instantly making your hand go completely numb and causing your teeth to chatter violently. The coldness radiated into your chest, stealing the air straight from your lungs.

Leon froze instantly, his eyes dropping down to look at your hand. You froze right along with him, your fingers trembling against his jacket, the sensory overload making your head spin.

"What the..." Leon breathed, his voice barely a whisper. His jaw went slack as he stared at your hand firmly pressed against the center of his spectral leather jacket. He looked up at you, his blue eyes wide, completely overwhelmed by a mixture of shock and a sudden, terrifying amusement. "Did you... did you just touch me?"

"You're solid!" you gasped, quickly pulling your hand back as if you had just touched a burning stove. You aggressively rubbed your freezing, tingling palm against your cardigan, trying to chase away the numbing chill. "Why are you solid?! Are you a zombie?! Oh my God, I got bit by some mutating bug in the breakroom, didn't I? I'm turning!"

"I'm not a zombie! Look at my skin, do I look like a zombie to you?!" Leon shot back, his voice rising in pitch as he held his hands out defensively, gesturing to his perfectly intact, albeit glowing, face.

He looked like he was absolutely losing his mind, his usual cool, calculated secret-agent composure completely disintegrating into frantic chaos. For five years, he had been a ghost, a phantom who couldn't interact with a single living thing. And now, an overworked analyst was shoving him like he was a physical nuisance.

"And I'm not solid!" Leon continued, pacing back and forth in a tight circle, his feet hovering just above the floor. "I haven't been able to pick up a coffee mug in five years! I spent an hour last night just trying to move a box an inch to mess with Collins, and you just shoved me! With force!"

"You're Leon Kennedy! You're dead!" you yelled, pressing yourself as hard as you could against the metal shelving, your eyes darting frantically toward the exit door, calculating how fast you could run if you bolted. "There was a whole federal memorial service! I literally just read your redacted file! Am I dead? Did the box kill me? Is this the afterlife?!"

You blurted the questions out in pure, unadulterated panic, your hands flying up to touch your head where the box had bonked you, then down to touch your arms and torso to check if you were still a flesh-and-blood human or if you had joined him in the great beyond.

"I don't know! I don't know how any of this works!" Leon yelled back, throwing his hands in the air, his tone entirely frantic yet carrying a breathless, disbelieving laugh. He was losing his composure, but there was a spark of wild, desperate excitement in his eyes that he couldn't hide. "I've been wandering around this building and anywhere I could for half a decade talking to myself, and suddenly an overworked analyst gets bonked on the head by a thirty-pound box and starts using my full ass government name!"

"Don't yell at me, I have a concussion!" you shouted, clutching your throbbing forehead, where a prominent, angry red bump was officially making its debut.

"You're the one who started yelling!" Leon countered loudly.

But he immediately winced, his frantic expression softening into a look of guilty panic as he saw you wince and double over slightly in pain. The sharp volume of the shouting match was making the throbbing in your skull tenfold worse. Leon instinctively reached out to help, his hands hovering uncertainly just above your shoulders, looking completely torn between wanting to comfort you and being terrified that touching you again might trigger another static shock.

"Look, just... take a breath," Leon said, his voice dropping into a lower, calmer register, though it still vibrated with residual adrenaline. "Don't pass out again. Please. I don't know if my afterlife ego can handle another round of this."

You took a ragged, trembling breath, forcing yourself to stare directly at him. Your chest heaved as you tried to ground yourself. Up close, the translucency was undeniable. You could clearly see the blurred labels of the archive boxes right through his torso, yet the sharp lines of his face, the striking blue of his eyes, and the sheer, chaotic emotion radiating off him felt entirely too real to be a hallucination.

The archive room was completely soundproofed, tucked away in an isolated corner of the fourth floor where only the occasional night-shift agent lingered for overtime. No alarms were blaring. No coworkers had burst through the door to find you screaming at thin air.

It was just you and a very panicked, very dead, highly respected agent.

"This isn't happening," you muttered, closing your eyes tightly and squeezing your temples, trying to block out the impossible sight. "I'm asleep. I fell asleep at my desk because I've been working fourteen-hour days, and my brain is punishing me with a highly specific, historically accurate fever dream."

"Hey."

Leon's voice was much quieter now, carrying a strange, hollow sort of weight that resonated deep in your chest.

You opened your eyes. He had shifted, sitting cross-legged on the cold linoleum floor a few feet away from you, deliberately giving you your space so you wouldn't feel cornered. He looked down at his own hands, flipping them over back and forth, flexing his fingers as if he were seeing them for the first time in years.

"I wish it was a dream, sweetheart," Leon said, a self-deprecating, tired smile tugging at the corner of his lips as he looked back up at you. "But unless we're sharing the exact same delusion... I think you're stuck with me."

You sat there on the cold floor for what felt like an eternity, your knees pulled up tightly to your chest as you slowly waited for your heart rate to return to something resembling a normal rhythm. The initial, blind terror was beginning to recede, leaving behind a heavy, numbing exhaustion. Your head was throbbing violently, a sharp, localized spike of pain pulsing right where the cardboard box had made contact.

Leon remained right where he was, sitting cross-legged a few feet away. His initial panic had entirely faded, replaced by an intense, captivated curiosity. He watched you with an alertness that made you incredibly self-conscious, his blue eyes tracking every blink, every breath you took. For a man who had been starved of human connection for five years, you were the center of his universe right now.

"Man, that is going to be a nasty one," Leon suddenly remarked, breaking the heavy silence. A small, teasing smirk played on his lips as he pointed toward your face, his old, relaxed wit beginning to resurface now that the crisis had passed. "You've got a pretty impressive knot forming right in the middle of your forehead. It’s turning a lovely shade of purple already."

You glared at him, wincing as you lightly tapped the swelling skin with your fingertips. "Glad my physical trauma is amusing to you, Kennedy."

"Hey, I offered to catch it. Not my fault my hands currently have the consistency of morning fog," he joked, though his smile faded a bit, replaced by a look of genuine concern. He leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees, his eyes softening. "Seriously though... Are you okay? No blurry vision? Besides seeing dead people, I mean."

"My head feels like it was hit by a truck, but otherwise, I think I'm intact," you muttered, letting out a long, exhausted sigh.

You looked around at the scattered papers on the floor, the top-secret files on Lanshiang that had caused this entire mess, then back at the translucent man sitting across from you. The absurdity of the situation hit you all over again, but the investigator in you was slowly pushing past the fear.

"Alright. Let's talk," you said, trying to summon whatever professional dignity you had left while sitting on a dirty floor. "Because right now, absolutely nothing about this scene makes logical sense. What exactly is this? Why are you here?"

Leon let out a dry, humorless chuckle, running a hand through his messy blonde hair. "If you're looking for an official government briefing, I'm afraid I'm entirely out of the loop. I know I'm dead. I've known for five years. But as for why or how? Your guess is as good as mine."

"You don't know how you died?" you asked, your brow furrowing despite the sharp sting of the bruise.

"Nope." Leon shook his head, his expression turning distant and deeply thoughtful, a flash of old, serious agent crossing his features before it settled back into a melancholic calm. "One minute I was on a classified follow-up operation after China, tracking down some loose ends, and the next... I woke up in my old apartment. I thought I'd just had a really bad nightmare, so I got up and tried to go to work. But when I got to the office, nobody looked at me. Nobody said good morning. My handler, Hunnigan, walked right through my chest to grab a file, and that’s when the horror movie logic finally clicked."

He gave a small, helpless shrug, the movement strangely fluid for a man who didn't technically exist anymore. "I even attended my own memorial service a few weeks later. Empty casket, obviously, since they never recovered my body. So... For five years, I've been roaming these halls, watching everyone move on, completely invisible. Nobody has seen me… Nobody has heard me…And absolutely nobody has been able to touch me."

You listened quietly, the lingering annoyance from his previous teasing completely melting away into a profound, aching sense of empathy. To be trapped in a state of limbo for five long years, watching the world carry on around you while you remain entirely isolated in a frozen, eternal silence... It sounded like an absolute living hell. You couldn't even begin to comprehend the sheer strength it took to keep from entirely shattering under that kind of loneliness.

"I shoved you earlier, though..." you said softly, your voice barely carrying in the quiet room as you looked down at your own hands. "And it felt solid. Like ice, but completely solid."

"Yeah," Leon murmured, his solemn eyes locking onto yours, a sudden, heavy seriousness taking over his features. "That shouldn't have happened. I shouldn't be able to interact with people. Physical objects like paper or a box, sure, if I focus hard enough. But people? Never. It’s a hard rule. Or at least, I thought it was until a minute ago."

Driven by a sudden wave of curiosity that completely overrode your remaining fear, you slowly shifted forward on the floor, closing the distance between the two of you until you were sitting just inches apart. Leon watched your every movement intently, his body tensing slightly, his gaze dropping as you slowly reached your hand out toward him, palm up, offering an open invitation.

"Can I...?" you trailed off, leaving the question hanging in the air, your heart fluttering with a nervous anticipation.

Leon looked down at your hand, then up at your face, swallowing hard. The playful, confident agent was gone, replaced by someone entirely vulnerable, almost terrified of what might happen next. "Go ahead. Let's see if it was a total fluke."

Slowly, deliberately, you lowered your hand onto his.

The moment your fingers brushed against his, a soft gasp escaped your lips. Your hand didn't slide through him like morning mist. Instead, your fingers curled smoothly around his palm, and his translucent fingers instinctively closed tightly around yours. The sensory contrast was staggering. To you, holding his hand felt like holding a firmly sculpted piece of solid ice. It was freezing, a numbing and deep cold that sent a sharp shiver straight up your spine, but there was an undeniable, grounding firmness to his grip. He felt real.

But for Leon? The reaction was instantaneous, violent, and utterly overwhelming.

The exact second your warm skin made direct contact with his, Leon's breath hitched sharply, his entire body flinching as if a massive jolt of pure electricity had just been shot straight through his spiritual form. His eyes blew wide open, staring down at your intertwined hands in absolute, staggering shock.

For five years, his entire existence had been entirely numb. Cold. Boring. A monotonous, lonely blur of gray where nothing could reach him and he could reach nothing. He hadn't felt the brush of a shoulder, the warmth of the sun, or the comfort of another person's touch since the day he died. But the moment your hand clasped around his, a rush of blinding, radiant warmth flooded through his spectral veins. It felt like standing under a blazing sun after an eternity in the absolute dark. It was warm, so incredibly warm and alive, and it instantly shattered the crushing, heavy isolation he had carried for half a decade.

Leon's chest rose and fell in a heavy, ragged phantom breath. His jaw tightened, the muscles working furiously as a wave of intense, raw emotion washed over his face. His eyes shimmered with a sudden, breathless intensity. He didn't pull away. If anything, his grip tightened, his fingers locking firmly between yours, squeezing with a desperate strength as if he were utterly terrified that if he let go for even a fraction of a second, he would slide right back into the freezing, empty dark.

"You're..." Leon's voice cracked completely, a raw, vulnerable sound that tore through the quiet storage room and vibrated right in your chest. He looked up from your hands, his eyes searching yours with a wild, pleading focus. "You're so warm."

You stared at him, feeling the solid, freezing weight of his hand in yours, realizing in that exact moment that whatever was happening between you and the ghost of Leon S. Kennedy... your life was never going to be the same again. The boundary between the living and the dead had just blurred in the palm of your hand.

Slowly, you let out a soft chuckle at his breathless comment, the sheer absurdity of the moment finally overriding your residual panic and easing the heavy tension in the air. "Well, you're absolutely freezing," you countered teasingly, your voice still a bit breathless from the shock.

A genuine, amused chuckle rumbled deep in Leon's chest, the sound rich and warm despite the icy temperature of his skin. Without breaking eye contact, he slowly rose to his feet, his fingers still firmly laced through yours. With a gentle, deliberate tug, he anchored his energy and helped you pull yourself up off the slick linoleum floor.

"Thank you..." you murmured as you stood, swaying just a fraction as your center of gravity shifted. Thankfully, the intense dizziness from earlier had mostly subsided, leaving behind a dull, rhythmic throbbing centered right at the angry red bump on your forehead.

You looked down at your intertwined hands, realizing you were still casually holding onto a ghost, and cleared your throat slightly, a bit flustered. "By the way... I should probably introduce myself. I'm—"

"Sweetheart, I know who you are," Leon interrupted, his signature smirk returning full force as he finally let your hand slip from his grip, though his fingers lingered against yours for a fraction of a second, trailing over your skin as if he were loath to lose the warmth. He crossed his arms, leaning his translucent shoulder casually against the metal shelving unit. "I was hovering right at your desk earlier today while you were trying to make sense of all those black marker bars on your monitor."

Your eyes widened slightly, a sudden flush of embarrassment hitting your cheeks. "You were watching me?"

"Hey, don't make it sound creepy. I was supervising," he defended smoothly, flashing a playful, boyish wink that made him look entirely alive for a split second. "Besides, you're the only agent in this entire division currently chasing a five-year-old ghost story. Can you blame me for being a little curious?"

You rubbed the back of your neck, a sheepish smile tugging at your lips before the reality of your situation crashed back into your mind. The investigative instinct that had brought you down to this frozen archive room began to spark again. You looked down at the floor, where the contents of the Lanshiang box were still completely scattered. Redacted crime scene photos, chopped-up timelines, and classified transport manifests stared back at you.

"So..." you began, looking from the mess on the floor back up to the legendary DSO agent. "Where exactly do we go from here? Because officially, I am supposed to be solving a black-market viral smuggling case. But unofficially... I think I'm losing my mind."

Leon's playful demeanor softened, his blue eyes dropping to the scattered files before rising to meet your gaze with a newfound seriousness. The casual posture vanished, replaced by the sharp, calculating focus of a veteran operative.

"Maybe you aren't as crazy as you think," Leon said, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly register that sent a distinct shiver down your spine. He stepped closer, hovering just over your shoulder as his eyes scanned a specific page jutting out from the battered cardboard box. "What did you say the name of the official file on your desk was?"

"Operation: Broken Mirror," you answered, shifting slightly so he could get a better look, still trying to adapt to the bizarre reality of a ghost reading over your shoulder. "It’s a massive web of untraceable transactions and degraded C-Virus samples moving through East Asia. No central supplier, no paper trail. Just a bunch of dead ends that somehow loop back to Lanshiang in 2013."

Leon went entirely still, the faint luminescence of his form flickering ever so slightly against the dim lighting of the aisle. He stared intently at the unredacted header on the document—it was a comprehensive list of seized cargo ship manifests from a port in Macau.

"I remember that name," Leon murmured, a sudden, heavy shadow crossing his handsome features. He rubbed the back of his neck, his brow furrowing in deep frustration as he tried to claw back memories that felt just out of reach. "Broken Mirror. Right before things went dark for me five years ago, the DSO was picking up chatter about an off-the-books operation under that exact code name. I was sent to track down a rogue courier network trying to salvage what was left of Neo-Umbrella's research."

You blinked, the breath catching in your throat as the puzzle pieces you had been desperately fighting with for weeks suddenly threatened to connect. Your mind raced through the implications. "Are you saying your last mission was directly tied to the case on my desk?"

"I think so," Leon admitted, looking down at his own translucent hands with a bitter, self-deprecating smile. "The memories are hazy—like looking through a scratched lens. I don't remember how the mission ended. I don't remember getting hurt, or who was there, or how I ended up as a wandering ghost. But if your case is picking up the trail of the same people I was hunting... then the answers to what happened to me are buried somewhere in your paperwork."

He looked back at you, the heavy shadow lifting just enough to let a faint, determined smirk touch his lips. For the first time in five years, he wasn't just a passive spectator. He had a purpose again. "Looks like my unfinished business just walked right into my closet. You have the clearance and the physical hands to dig through the bureaucracy, and I have the first-hand tactical knowledge of what actually happened in 2013. You help me figure out how I ended up like this, and I'll help you break this case wide open."

You let out a long breath, looking at the handsome, translucent man who had just completely upended your entire perception of reality. The case on your desk wasn't just a routine smuggling investigation anymore. It was a lifeline for a man trapped between worlds, a chance to finally give a fallen hero the closure he deserved.

"A partnership with a ghost," you muttered, a small, wry smile forming on your lips as you looked down at the mess on the floor. "The Bureau definitely didn't cover this in training."

"Hey," Leon chuckled, stepping back into your line of sight with an appreciative glint in his eyes. "We're the perfect team. You do the paperwork, and I'll make sure nobody sneaks up on you. Deal?" He says with an raised eyebrow along with a proud smirk.

"Alright, Kennedy," you sighed, a breathless laugh escaping your lips as you stepped forward to carefully gather the scattered papers. Your fingers brushed against the smooth, classified manifests and redacted crime scene photos, sliding them back into the archive box with methodical care.

"First rule of our new partnership… When we're out in the bullpen, you cannot talk to me. My coworkers already think I'm losing my mind from working overtime.” She sighs while letting out a chuckle while lightly shaking her head, “I don't need them thinking I'm actively arguing with the air."

Leon let out a soft laugh, a rich, genuine sound that seemed to lack the physical resonance of a living voice but carried an unmistakable warmth. His boots hovered just a millimeter above the linoleum floor, completely weightless, as he watched you lift the heavy, battered box back into your arms.

"Fair enough, sweetheart. I can play nice," he chuckled, his eyes crinkling at the corners with an easy, boyish charm that felt entirely out of place in the dark, dusty basement. "But I'm warning you... your division's taste in breakroom coffee is an absolute crime against humanity, and I will be complaining about it on the ride home."

"Ride home?! You're coming home with me?!"

Your voice cracked slightly, the sharp exclamation echoing a bit too loudly against the enclosed concrete walls of the archive room. Panic flaring, you quickly clamped your free hand over your mouth, casting a wide-eyed glance toward the heavy metal door. You half-expected a security guard or an aggressive Agent Collins to burst in, demanding to know who you were shouting at.

Leon didn't even flinch. Instead, he leaned back against the shelving unit, locking his hands behind his head in a relaxed, effortless posture that completely defied the laws of gravity. "Well, unless you're planning on setting up a sleeping bag right here between the nineties tax records and the biochemical disaster reports, then yeah. I'm tagging along. I don't exactly have a lot of options, sweetheart."

"What do you mean you don't have options?" you whispered aggressively, lowering your hand but keeping your voice down to a sharp, frantic hiss. "You're a ghost! Can't you just... disappear? Go to a luxury hotel? Haunt a beach resort?"

Leon let out a dry, amused chuckle, shaking his head as a fleeting look of melancholy passed over his handsome features. "I wish ghost mechanics worked like that, but unfortunately, the afterlife bureaucracy is just as rigid as the federal government's. First off, I don't have a house anymore. The second the Bureau officially filed my KIA paperwork five years ago, the government moved in. All my assets, my bank accounts, my properties—all completely seized and liquidated. I'm broke in both life and death."

You stared at him, your brain violently trying to process the absolute absurdity of a legendary secret agent complaining about his frozen credit score. The stark, cold reality of his situation was beginning to set in. "So... where exactly have you been staying for the last five years?"

"Honestly? I move around," Leon said, shifting his weight as he floated a fraction of an inch higher off the ground, his boots drifting lazily over the scattered dust motes. "Most nights, I crash in my old handler's office. Hunnigan stays up so late doing paperwork that the background noise of her typing is actually kind of comforting. Or I'll just find an empty couch here in the FBI building. It’s a thrilling existence, really."

"Wait, you sleep?" you asked, your eyebrows furrowing in deep confusion as your eyes scanned his translucent form. "You don't have a metabolism. You don't get physically tired. Why on earth do you need to sleep?"

"Look, I told you, ghost mechanics are weird," Leon defended, throwing his hands up with a boyish, defensive grin. "Do I need to sleep? Mechanically? Probably not. But turns out, when you’ve spent your entire adult life running from biological weapons and survival situations, your brain builds up a pretty strong habit of napping whenever there's a quiet moment. It's more of a psychological comfort thing. It passes the time when the rest of the world goes dark and quiet."

You looked down at the heavy, battered archive box cradled securely in your arms, then back up at the translucent, homeless legend leaning casually against the metal shelf. A strange, completely irrational wave of protectiveness washed over you. Leaving a national hero to spend his eternity sleeping on squeaky leather couches in a lonely government building or on the hard floor of a dark archive room just felt inherently, deeply wrong.

"Alright," you sighed, finally giving in to the absolute madness of the situation. "Fine. You can stay at my place. I have a couch. It's not exactly a five-star hotel, but it doesn't smell like damp dust and old ink."

Leon’s eyes blinked open a little wider, a genuine, soft look of surprise breaking through his casual, playful facade. The snark vanished for a brief second, leaving him looking intensely human. "Seriously? You're offering a ghost your couch?"

"Don't make me regret it, Kennedy," you warned, though a small, genuine smile finally tugged at the corner of your lips. "But we have a major tactical problem. We have to walk through a building filled with trained federal investigators. If I start talking to a man who isn't there, I'm going to end up in a psych evaluation before I even reach the parking garage."

"Way ahead of you, Agent," Leon said, pointing a finger at your cardigan pocket.

You blinked, reaching down into your pocket until your fingers brushed against the tangled, familiar plastic cord of your phone accessories. You pulled out a single white earbud.

"Put that in," Leon instructed, his signature smirk returning full force. "Put it in one ear. If anyone catches you talking, just pretend you're on a hands-free call with a very demanding, incredibly handsome boyfriend. It works every time. I've watched half the tech division use that exact excuse to talk to themselves."

You rolled your eyes playfully at him, untangling the cord and securely clicking the bud into your right ear. "You're entirely too comfortable with this and damn, Kennedy, you really have a big ass ego."

"Ouch…," he winced sarcastically, throwing his hand over his non-beating heart and throwing his head back as if that single comment had been the final, fatal blow to his existence. "Right in the afterlife pride."

With a deep, centering breath to steady your hammering nerves, you carried the heavy archive box to the threshold, using your elbow to push the heavy door open. The transition from the isolated, frozen archive room back into the concrete hallways felt instantly jarring. Leon followed closely behind, effortlessly gliding through the air beside you, his form casting absolutely no shadow on the stark, white walls.

You made your way up the elevator, the heavy cardboard box weighing down your arms, and walked back out onto the main bullpen floor. The night shift had fully taken over by now, the bright overhead fluorescent lights turned down to a dim, muted glow. Only a few scattered desks were illuminated by the harsh blue light of computer monitors, casting long shadows across the floor.

You walked straight to your cubicle, setting the heavy Lanshiang archive box down on the floor right beside your desk, wedging it safely beneath the fabric divider so it would be ready for tomorrow's deep dive.

"Nice place you got here," Leon commented, casually leaning over your desk to inspect a small, slightly wilted succulent sitting next to your keyboard. He tried to tap one of the leaves, but his translucent finger passed right through the green flesh, leaving a faint, shimmering trail of frosty condensation behind on the desk. "A little bleak, but the paperwork fortress really pulls the room together."

"Shut it before I reconsider offering you the couch and make you sleep on the hardwood floor instead," you murmured under your breath, pretending to adjust the earbud wire near your jaw as you packed your laptop and notepad into your leather work bag.

"Fine, fine… I take that back," Leon chuckled, stepping back and crossing his arms as he watched you throw the heavy bag over your shoulder.

You began the long walk toward the elevators, your heart hammering frantically against your ribs. It was an incredibly bizarre, dizzying sensation. As you walked down the central aisle of the bullpen, you passed Agent Sanchez, who was intensely typing away at a late-night report. Leon casually strolled right past her desk, pausing to playfully wave his hand directly in front of her face. Sanchez didn't even blink. She just reached blindly for her coffee mug, completely unaware that a piece of living history had just passed within inches of her computer.

Your stomach did a weird, nervous flip. It was one thing to know Leon was a ghost in the absolute isolation of the basement, but seeing the absolute, total disconnect between him and the rest of the world out in the open was deeply surreal. Nobody could see him. Nobody could hear the slight, gravelly tone of his voice. To the entire world, he was completely gone. Obliterated from existence.

Except to you.

"Keep moving, sweetheart. You're staring," Leon reminded you softly. His voice echoed clearly perfectly audible in your free left ear as he began walking backward in front of you, fluidly navigating the layout of the desks without ever looking behind him, guiding you toward the elevator doors.

You quickly tore your eyes away from him, forcing your gaze straight ahead as the elevator doors opened and carried the two of you down to the main lobby.

The ground floor was quiet, the massive marble lobby echoing with the distant, muffled hum of the city streets outside. At the front desk, a veteran security guard named Marcus sat behind the bulletproof glass, a small television humming quietly in the corner of his station, casting a warm glow over his logbook.

As you approached the security turnstiles, a heavy wave of self-consciousness hit you. You reached out, sliding your federal ID badge across the electronic scanner. Beep.

"Heading out for the night, Agent?" Marcus asked, looking up from his logbook with a tired, friendly smile.

"Yes, sir," you said, forcing a normal, professional, and entirely calm tone into your voice while your fingers tightly gripped the leather strap of your bag. "Just finishing up some loose ends from the afternoon."

"Get some rest. You look beat," Marcus replied kindly, hitting the release button and waving you through.

"Goodnight, Marcus," you said.

Right as you stepped through the turnstile, Leon casually leaned over the security barrier, looking directly at the older guard. "Goodnight, Marcus. Take it easy on the night shift," Leon said, his tone incredibly natural, his expression soft, as if he fully expected the man to look up and answer him.

Marcus didn't move. He didn't even twitch. He just looked right through Leon's translucent torso, his eyes tracking you as you walked toward the heavy glass exit doors.

A heavy, aching feeling settled deep in your chest. It was so incredibly jarring—the sudden, crushing realization that you were walking alongside a man who had given absolutely everything to this country, yet he was completely dead to the very system he had sacrificed his life to protect. He was a phantom in his own home.

As the heavy glass doors hissed open and the cool, real-world evening air hit your face, you stepped out onto the concrete steps of the plaza. The city streets were alive with the distant sound of passing sirens, honking yellow cabs, and the steady, rhythmic hum of D.C. traffic.

Leon stepped out right beside you, shoving his hands deep into his jacket pockets as he paused on the top step. He looked up at the darkened sky, the brilliant neon city lights reflecting faintly in his ghostly, glowing blue eyes.

"You know," Leon said quietly, the teasing, sarcastic edge completely gone from his voice as he looked down the bustling street, a heavy tone of reverence taking over. "It’s been five years since I’ve actually left that building at night. I forgot how loud this city gets."

You adjusted your earbud, looking straight ahead as you began walking toward the parking garage a street down, but your heart felt strangely full, the fear completely gone.

"Well, Kennedy," you murmured softly into the open air, making sure it looked like you were speaking directly into your wired earbuds, "... Welcome back to the real world."

—

The concrete structure of the parking garage was cavernous, casting deep, geometric shadows under the low-wattage yellow lights that buzzed overhead. The air here was vastly different from the stagnant dust of the fourth-floor archive room. Here, it tasted faintly of exhaust fumes, rubber, and the crisp evening breeze drifting in from the D.C. streets. Your footsteps echoed sharply against the oil-stained concrete, a stark contrast to Leon’s absolute, uncanny silence as he glided right in step with you.

You dug into your cardigan pocket, your fingers wrapping around your keys. With a quick press of the unlock button, your compact car chirped twice, its headlights slicing through the gloom of the dimly lit corner where you had parked.

As you approached the driver’s side, you automatically began to reach over to unlock the passenger door for your new, spectral hitchhiker. But before your hand could even touch the handle, you froze.

Leon didn’t even hesitate. With his hands still casually shoved deep into his jacket pockets, he strolled right up to the passenger side. Without reaching out, breaking stride, or opening the door, he simply stepped forward. His body fluidly dissolved through the solid steel panel and glass windows of the car, melting through the frame like a drop of ink in water.

A second later, he was sitting comfortably in the passenger seat, shifting his weight with an easy, practiced grace.

You stood outside the driver’s side door, your jaw dropping slightly as you stared at him through the windshield. It was one thing to see him floating in that cramped storage room just down the hall from your cubicle; it was another entirely to watch him effortlessly bypass a locked, solid vehicle door like it was nothing more than air.

"Are you just going to stand out there and catch flies, sweetheart, or are we actually going?" Leon’s voice drifted clearly through the glass, carrying that familiar, amused rasp.

You snapped out of your trance, quickly opening your door and sliding into the driver's seat. You twist your body towards the back, setting your heavy leather work bag on the floorboards of the backseats, you turn your head to openly gawk at him. "You just... went straight through the metal. No resistance at all?"

"Told you, ghost mechanics," Leon chuckled, leaning his head back against the headrest. He adjusted his position, crossing one leg over the other. "Though, I gotta admit, it's nice to sit in a vehicle again. Even if I'm not the one driving."

Your eyes dropped down to his lap, and then to the side of the seat. "Aren't you going to put on a seatbelt?"

Leon let out a rich, genuine laugh, turning his head to look at you with an incredibly amused smirk. He gestured to his translucent torso, where the dark texture of his leather jacket subtly blended with the fabric of your car seat. "What exactly do you think a seatbelt is going to do for me, Agent? If you hit a brick wall at sixty miles an hour, you're going to get a face full of the airbag, and I'm just going to gracefully drift through the dashboard like a bad smell. I think I'll risk it."

"Right. Logically, I know that," you muttered, a bit flustered as you slotted the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine roared to life, a steady, comforting vibration filling the small cabin. "It's just... a force of habit. I don't need my car aggressively beeping at me for the next twenty minutes because my passenger is a safety hazard."

You braced yourself, fully expecting the weight sensor in the passenger seat to trigger. In modern cars, even a heavy grocery bag could set off the relentless, high-pitched seatbelt warning chime. You waited for the familiar ding-ding-ding to start blaring through the dashboard.

The dashboard remained perfectly silent. The small digital display showed your fuel level, the time, and a completely clear passenger safety status.

You blinked, looking down at the empty, glowing space where a physical body should be pressing into the cushions. "Wow. It really doesn't detect you at all."

"See? Pure phantom. Zero footprint," Leon said proudly, leaning forward a bit to inspect your dashboard controls, though his hand hovered safely away from actually touching the buttons. "Your car thinks the seat is completely empty. No mass, no weight, no annoying alarms. Just a highly intelligent, incredibly charming co-pilot."

"Don't flatter yourself, Kennedy," you teased, shifting the car into reverse and looking over your shoulder to back out of the parking space. "You're less of a co-pilot and more of a supernatural stowaway. And remember the rules—once we get out on the road, if we stop at a red light, you can't be making any weird faces at the drivers next to us."

Leon let out a soft, delighted chuckle that seemed to vibrate pleasantly in the tight space of the car. "Hey, no promises. If someone is driving like an idiot in D.C. traffic, they deserve to be haunted a little bit."

As you guided the car down the concrete ramps of the garage and out onto the street, the drive quickly became fairly calming, as it typically was after a long day of work. You reached over and pressed play on the playlist on your phone, which was connected to the speakers of the car, filling the small cabin with some soft, mellow R&B music. The low, soothing bass immediately worked to dissolve the leftover adrenaline humming in your veins. After a long shift of staring at heavily redacted files and getting physically assaulted by a rogue box of data, the familiar, smooth melodies felt like a lifeline.

You kept your eyes firmly anchored to the road, but out of your peripheral vision, you can see Leon being surprisingly quiet. The restless, high-energy panic he had thrown around on the fourth floor had settled into a calm, almost reverent stillness. He had eased himself back against the passenger seat, casually propping his left elbow onto the small plastic ledge of the car window. He rested his jaw in his open palm, his fingers curling slightly against his cheek as he watched the city slip past, just enjoying the ride and admiring the brilliant city views.

Because his form was weightless, the bumps in the road didn't jar him the way they did you, instead, he simply swayed fluidly with the motion of the vehicle, completely at peace.

Through the glass, the vibrant neon storefronts, towering streetlights, and amber glows of passing vehicles sliced right through his torso, painting his pale, spectral frame in shifting hues of gold and deep blue. His glowing eyes followed the rhythm of the city, tracking a couple walking a dog on the sidewalk, watching a cab cut through traffic, lingering on the brightly lit canopy of a late-night diner.

It was just a 15-minute drive to your apartment complex, a route you usually drove in a mindless, exhausted blur. But tonight, seeing it reflected in the gaze of a man who hadn't seen the moonlit streets of D.C. from a moving vehicle in half a decade made the mundane commute feel entirely different.

"You have good taste," Leon murmured quietly, his deep, gravelly voice cutting through the soft vocals of the track playing through the speakers. He didn't turn his head away from the window, but a small, relaxed smile played at the corner of his lips. "It beats listening to the hum of the fourth-floor mainframe at two in the morning, that's for sure."

You glanced at him for a quick split second before looking back at the traffic light ahead. "I figured you'd be more of a classic rock guy. Or maybe hair metal."

Leon let out a soft, amused breath that didn't fog up the windowpane. "Hey, I can appreciate the classics, but after five years of absolute silence, anything with a good bassline feels like a luxury. Keep the music playing, sweetheart. I'm just enjoying the view."

Your fingers gripped the steering wheel just a fraction tighter as that final word hung in the warm, music-filled air of the car.

Sweetheart.

He had thrown the nickname around a few times back in the archive room on the fourth floor, but wrapped in the frantic chaos of your initial panic, your brain hadn't fully registered it. Now, sitting in the intimate, dimly lit cabin of your car with the low, velvet bass of the R&B track humming through the speakers, the word hit differently.

The way Leon said it wasn't just a casual, dismissive term of endearment. It was the way his deep, gravelly voice naturally dipped an octave lower when he spoke it, dripping with a smooth, effortless confidence. It was a lazy, low murmur that carried a faint touch of his signature, boyish playfulness—a sound so undeniably attractive it sent a sudden, treacherous jolt of electricity straight down your spine.

For a terrifying second, your knees felt entirely liquid, a soft flush of heat creeping up your neck and settling high in your cheeks. You were deeply grateful that you were currently sitting down, because if you had been standing, that low rasp alone might have genuinely made you wobble.

You forced your eyes to stay glued to the asphalt ahead, desperately trying to keep your breathing steady so he wouldn’t catch on. You were a professional federal investigator, for heaven's sake. You shouldn't be getting flustered over a piece of decades-old casual charm deployed by a literal phantom.

But God, you really, really liked the way it sounded coming from him.

"Something wrong?" Leon asked smoothly.

Out of the corner of your eye, you saw him finally pull his head away from the glass. He turned his torso toward you, shifting his weight against the passenger seat as his bright, ghostly blue eyes locked onto your profile, tracking the subtle tightness in your jaw with a look of sudden, quiet amusement.

"Nothing," you blurted out a little too quickly, clearing your throat to mask the slight crack in your voice. You aggressively flicked your blinker on to signal a turn. "Just... concentrating on the lane merge. D.C. drivers are notoriously feral at night."

Leon let out a low, rumbling chuckle that vibrated pleasantly in the small space, clearly not buying your excuse for a second. He leaned back, a smug, knowing smirk tugging at the corner of his lips as he went back to enjoying the view, leaving you to fight the lingering warmth in your cheeks for the rest of the drive.

The car glided forward as the light turned green, pulling you closer to the safety of your apartment, the gentle melody filling the space between the living analyst and the phantom agent.

You navigated the car down the steep, curving ramp into the subterranean parking level of your apartment complex. The basement lot was notoriously bleak, cast in an eerie, flickering twilight by spaced-out halogen bulbs that buzzed like angry hornets. Deep shadows clung to the heavy concrete pillars, and the damp, cool air smelled faintly of stagnant moisture and old tires. Usually, walking through this creepy, isolated space alone at night made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

You pulled into your assigned space, shifted into park, and killed the engine. The sudden absence of the car's rumble and the smooth R&B music left a heavy, echoing silence in the dim garage.

Unbuckling your seatbelt, you grabbed your leather work bag and stepped out into the chilly air, slamming the door shut. With a quick press of your key fob, the car gave a sharp, definitive beep, its lights flashing once before plunging the corner back into shadow.

Turning around, you watched as Leon casually drifted right through the solid passenger door. He didn't have to wait for the locks or push through heavy metal; his translucent form simply bled through the exterior paneling, stepping out onto the stained concrete floor as effortlessly as if he were walking through a heavy curtain. He paused, looking around the grim, shadow-drenched garage with a completely unbothered, alert expression, his hands tucked back into his jacket pockets.

As you slung your bag over your shoulder and gestured for him to follow, a sudden, bizarre thought struck you. You couldn't help but feel a warm, slightly ridiculous wave of amusement wash over your nerves. The way he was falling into step behind you, completely reliant on you for a dry place to crash, made you feel like you were secretly smuggling home a stray, homeless puppy you’d just scooped off the street. A very tall, incredibly lethal, and entirely translucent puppy with a devastating smirk, but a stray nonetheless. You were taking him home.

"Lead the way, boss," Leon murmured, his voice a low, comforting rasp that instantly shattered the creepy atmosphere of the basement.

You walked together toward the heavy metal doors that led to the residential elevators. You pressed the faded up-arrow button, the soft clunk of the machinery echoing through the empty garage. When the doors slid open with a dull chime, you both stepped inside the brightly lit elevator cab. You pressed the button for the 5th floor.

Leon stood beside you, leaning his shoulder casually against the mirrored back wall of the elevator. He watched the digital floor indicator tick upward, the bright fluorescent light above making his pale blue eyes catch a striking, ethereal luminescence.

Ding.

The doors slid open onto the quiet, carpeted hallway of the ninth floor. You led the way down the corridor, the rhythmic thud of your work shoes cushioned by the patterned carpet, while Leon glided along beside you in absolute, eerie silence. Finally, you came to a stop at the end of the hall, standing directly in front of your unit.

Mounted on the dark wood of the door were three polished brass digits:

520

You dug your keys out of your pocket, the metal jingling quietly in the silent hallway, and slotted the key into the lock. With a firm turn and a soft click, the deadbolt slid back, and you pushed the door open to welcome a five-year-old ghost story into your home.

You stepped across the threshold into the familiar, welcoming warmth of your apartment. Setting your heavy leather work bag down on the entryway console and turning on the lights, you let out a long, blissful sigh as you kicked off your stiff work heels. Slipping your aching feet into a pair of plush, incredibly soft slippers, you instantly felt the built-up tension of the long shift begin to drain from your body. There was truly no better feeling than shedding the rigid uniform of a federal investigator.

As you turned around to close the front door, you paused.

Leon was still standing out in the hallway. He remained perfectly still, hovering a fraction of an inch above the carpeted floor, his hands still shoved deep into his jacket pockets. He was looking at you through the open doorway, an uncharacteristically hesitant, polite expression crossing his handsome features as if he were waiting for an explicit invitation to cross the threshold of a living person's sanctuary.

A soft, amused smile tugged at your lips. After watching him casually phase through your locked car door like a rogue vapor, seeing him respect the boundary of your apartment doorway was oddly endearing.

"You can come in, Kennedy. It's alright," you assured him, gesturing toward the interior of your apartment.

When he still hesitated for a fraction of a second, you couldn't resist a playful roll of your eyes, letting out a soft chuckle. "Don't worry, I promise I'm not some secret psycho killer luring you into my trap." You tilted your head, your eyes crinkling with a teasing glint as you added, "And honestly, even if I was, it’s not like it would affect you. You're already dead. I don't think it's mechanically possible to kill a ghost twice."

Leon’s lips instantly twitched upward, the familiar, boyish smirk breaking through his brief hesitation. He let out a low, gravelly chuckle that vibrated pleasantly through the quiet entryway.

"Fair point, sweetheart. I guess my survival instincts are just hardwired at this point," he murmured, finally crossing the threshold.

He didn't need to take off any shoes or step out of the elements, effortlessly gliding past you into the main living area. The faint, crisp scent of frost and winter air seemed to trace his movement, a gentle reminder of his spectral nature as he began to take in the sight of your cozy home.

You scooped your work bag back off the entryway console and walked down the very short hallway, stepping fully into the main space.

Left to his own devices, Leon drifted a few paces behind you, his hands remaining tucked into his pockets as he took a slow, deliberate look around. For five years, his entire world had been confined to the stark, clinical walls of the federal building which housed monochrome cubicles, endless rows of gray servers, and cold fluorescent lighting that never turned off. Standing here, the mere layout of a real, lived-in apartment felt profoundly foreign, yet deeply grounding.

As he followed you past the open kitchen on the right, his eyes lingered on the sleek island. He noticed the three stools lined up neatly against the counter, easily deducing that this was where you sat to eat your meals, likely scrolling through your phone or reading over case files. Continuing straight, his boots glided over the transition from the kitchen floor to the softer texture of the living room rug.

When you reached over the plush couch resting against the right wall and clicked on the table lamp, Leon subtly blinked against the sudden change. A warm, rich amber glow bloomed through the space, reflecting softly off the coffee table and the television mounted on the opposite wall to his left. As you reached backward to flick off the harsh overhead switches, the room plunged into a cozy, relaxing twilight.

Leon watched the shadows soften, a quiet, almost imperceptible exhale escaping his lips. To your left, just before the threshold of the living room and past the kitchen island, he noted the small hallway that branched off into the rest of your apartment.

Straight ahead, the large floor-to-ceiling window overlooked the city. Even though the apartment wasn't exceptionally high up, the view of the D.C. streets through the slightly drawn curtains offered a comforting slice of the outside world he had been cut off from for so long.

More than the furniture, though, it was the sheer atmosphere of the space that caught him off guard. It smelled like clean laundry, vanilla, and home. For the first time in half a decade, he wasn't a phantom blending into the background of a bustling government office, entirely ignored by the living. He was being acknowledged. He had been explicitly invited across a threshold, given a designated spot on a couch, and brought into someone’s private sanctuary. The realization settled heavily in his chest, a strange, novel warmth blooming behind his ribs.

"Make yourself at home, Kennedy," you murmured softly, turning to face him. "Seriously. Sit on the couch, look out the window, do whatever you need to do. I’m going to go wash the workday off."

Leon pulled his gaze away from the floor-to-ceiling window, his bright, ghostly blue eyes locking onto yours. The usual quick-witted, sarcastic mask didn't slip back on right away, instead, his expression softened with a quiet, genuine reverence.

"Take your time, sweetheart," Leon replied, his deep, gravelly voice carrying a gentle sincerity as he gave you a reassuring nod.

He drifted toward the couch, his weightless form hovering just an inch above the cushions as he watched you turn down the small hallway to the left. You stepped into your bedroom adjacent to the living room to drop off your heavy leather work bag and grab a change of comfortable clothes which was a worn, oversized t-shirt and soft sweatpants.

Slipping into the bathroom directly opposite your room, you shut the door and place your change of clothes on the sink counter as you step into the shower and turn on the faucet. As the sound of rushing water filled the small bathroom, you finally took a breath, letting the exhaustion of the long shift wash away, leaving you alone with the surreal, strangely comforting reality of the legendary agent currently making himself at home in your living room.

Left completely to his own devices in the quiet apartment, Leon slowly drifted backward until the backs of his knees lined up with the edge of the cushions. He let himself drop, sinking back into your couch.

A soft, surprised breath hitched in his throat.

Even though he lacked the dense, physical mass of a living human, his spectral form still possessed a subtle weight that reacted to the world around him. As he leaned back, the fabric gave way, cradling him with a deep, pillowy yield. He rested his head against the top cushion, staring up at the ceiling as the distant, muffled hiss of the bathroom faucet echoed from down the short hallway.

It was incredibly soft. Softer than the stiff, squeaky leather couches in the FBI breakrooms. Softer than the ergonomic office chairs he’d tried to rest in, and infinitely softer than the cold, hard linoleum floor of the fourth-floor archive room.

Leon closed his eyes, letting his head loll to the side as he listened to the steady rhythm of the running water. He had spent the last five years in a state of hyper-vigilant suspension, a ghost wandering a hyper-secure government fortress, forever caught between the living world and whatever lay beyond. He had forgotten what it felt like to just exist in a space meant for comfort.

But it wasn't just the physical softness of the furniture that was getting to him. There was an undeniable, deep-seated warmth radiating through the entire apartment. It wasn't a change in temperature, his translucent skin was still faintly cool to the touch, but rather a profound, emotional heat that seemed to seep right into his core.

It was the exact same feeling he had experienced back in the archive room. The moment the rogue Lanshiang box had forced him into a violent, disorienting manifestation, you hadn't run away in terror. You hadn't called for security. Instead, you had reached out and wrapped your fingers tightly around his fading, translucent hand, grounding him to the real world when he felt himself slipping into the dark.

That same protective, fiercely kind energy was practically woven into the walls of this apartment. Leon opened his eyes, tracking the soft amber light of the table lamp as it danced across the coffee table, a quiet, genuine smile finally breaking across his face. He was actually safe. For the first time in five years, the weary agent could finally lower his guard.

The water from the bathroom soon stopped and soon replaced with the sounds of a hairdryer and when the rhythmic whir of the hairdryer down the hall finally went quiet, it left only the soft hum of the city traffic drifting through the floor-to-ceiling window. A few moments later, the bathroom door clicked open.

You stepped out into the hallway, your lungs expanding fully as you took a breath of cool, mist-tinted air. For the first time all day, you felt infinitely lighter. Your damp hair was casually tossed over one shoulder, still radiating a faint scent of your shampoo. Wrapped in an oversized, faded t-shirt and loose sweatpants, the rigid, tightly wound analyst who had been buried alive under classified paperwork on the fourth floor just hours ago had completely vanished. You looked entirely soft, comfortable, and settled into your own skin.

Leon’s head turned automatically as you drifted back into the living room. Seeing him there, just sprawled effortlessly across the fabric of your couch under the warm, amber wash of the table lamp, it sent a surreal, almost dizzying spike of warmth through your chest. Despite the faint, otherworldly blue luminescence tracing the contours of his jaw and shoulders, his presence in your apartment felt shockingly, devastatingly natural.

"Hold that thought," you murmured, offering him a small, sleepy smile that felt completely instinctual.

You pivoted back into your bedroom, your bare feet padding silently over the floorboards. Sliding your closet door open, you reached up to the top shelf and pulled down a spare, plush pillow and a thick, fuzzy throw blanket. Navigating the layout of your hallway, you carried the bundle back into the living room, approaching the edge of the couch. Gently, deliberately, you set the bedding down on the cushion right next to his hip.

"I know you said you don't technically need to sleep," you said softly, your voice dipping into a low, quiet register as you reached out to smooth down the edge of the blanket, making sure it didn't disrupt his weightless form. "But if you’re going to pass the time tonight, you might as well do it comfortably."

Leon looked from the fluffy white pillow up to your face, a look of profound, raw surprise melting the guarded, sarcastic mask he usually wore so tightly. His chest rose and fell in a slow, phantom breath, his broad shoulders relaxing into the couch as if the mere gesture had carried weight.

"Thanks, sweetheart," he murmured, his deep voice dropping an octave, carrying a gravelly, quiet intensity that made your heart skip a beat. "I appreciate it. Really."

Slipping into the empty space on the opposite end of the couch, you pull your knees tightly up to your chest, curling yourself up into a small ball under your shirt. You grabbed the remote from the coffee table, the plastic cool against your skin, and flicked the television on. You clicked the volume down until a random, low-stakes sitcom provided nothing more than a rhythmic, comforting murmur to fill the spaces between your breaths.

For a long time, neither of you spoke. The initial, suffocating terror of the archive closet felt like a lifetime away, dissolving into the cozy twilight of the room.

You stared at the TV screen, the blue light reflecting off your eyes, but the images blurred together. Your mind kept violently pulling back to the sheer, incomprehensible weight of his reality. Resting your cheek against your knees, you turned your head on the back of the couch, looking across the expanse of the cushions at the legendary agent.

"Hey, Leon?" you asked, your voice barely a breathy whisper cutting through the ambient noise of the television.

"Yeah?" He shifted, his heavy gaze tearing away from the screen to lock onto you. His blue eyes caught the amber glow of the lamp, shimmering like ice under fire.

"How... how did you do it?" You trailed off, a small, aching knot forming in your throat as a profound wave of empathy crashed over you. "The past five years. I just... I still can't entirely wrap my head around it. How does someone stay sane being basically alone for that long? Being entirely invisible to the rest of the world?"

The words left your mouth before your brain could filter them, hanging heavily in the warm, quiet air of the room. As the literal meaning of your question registered, a sudden, cold spike of panic flared in your chest. Your eyes widened, and you sat up a little straighter, horror washing over you at how incredibly insensitive, how blunt, that must have sounded to a man who had actually lived through that nightmare.

Worse, you were screaming at yourself inside your head and you thank the heavens that ghosts can’t read your inner mind. Did I seriously just ask a dead man how he kept from losing his mind? And oh my god, I just called him Leon. Ever since your chaotic encounter down the hall on the fourth floor, you had strictly stuck to "Kennedy" out of a professional, instinctual boundary of respect. Slipping up and using his first name in the middle of a deeply intrusive question made the heat in your face double in intensity.

"Oh my god, Leon, I am so sorry," you blurted out, your hands flying up in a flurry of anxious, apologetic gestures as your brain scrambled to fix the damage. "That was—I didn't mean it like that. I'm so incredibly sorry, that was so completely out of line and heartless of me to ask. Please ignore me, I'm just tired, and my mouth is running faster than my brain. I really didn't mean to poke at a sore spot—"

"Hey, hey, sweetheart—breathe," Leon cut in, his deep voice rich with sudden, effortless amusement.

You snapped your mouth shut, your face burning with a hot flush of embarrassment, your fingers twisting nervously in your lap. When you dared to look across the cushions, you found him leaning his head back against the couch, a genuine, delighted grin spreading across his face. He let out a low, rumbling chuckle that vibrated pleasantly in the quiet space, his broad shoulders shaking slightly as he watched you completely melt into a puddle of panic over using his name and asking your question.

"Relax," he teased, his ghostly blue eyes crinkling at the corners with pure affection. "I'm not made of glass. Well, technically, I'm not made of anything right now, but you get the point. And hey... I don't mind you using my first name, sweetheart. It’s been a really long time since I’ve heard someone say it."

The sheer, lighthearted amusement in his face instantly broke your internal spiral, turning your panicked horror into a sheepish, relieved sigh. You let your hands drop back onto your knees, muttering, "I still feel like a jerk."

"Don't," Leon chuckled, the smile lingering on his lips as his expression gradually softened, the playful edge settling into something much more intimate. He looked down at his translucent hands, turning his palms upward as the shifting light of the television danced across his pale skin like water.

"Honestly? In the beginning, it was rough," he admitted, his voice falling into a low, gravelly rasp… Leon chuckled, the smile lingering on his lips as his expression gradually softened, the playful edge settling into something much more intimate. He looked down at his translucent hands, turning his palms upward as the shifting light of the television danced across his pale skin like water.

"I spent the first few months screaming until my throat felt raw. I tried to get anyone—Hunnigan, old partners, total strangers on the street—to just look at me. To give me a nod. Anything. When you realize you're a ghost, the silence isn't just quiet, sweetheart. It's deafening. It feels like you're actively being erased piece by piece."

He let out a dry, soft chuckle, but the sound was entirely devoid of bitterness, it was just a tired, battle-worn acceptance. "But after a while, you adapt. It's what I was trained to do. I started treating it like an extended stakeout. I’d watch the junior agents crack cases, listen to the tech division gossip, wander the D.C. streets at night. You find these tiny, stupid little ways to tether yourself to the living world so you don't completely lose your mind."

Leon paused, his jaw tightening slightly as he pulled his gaze away from his hands. He looked up, locking his bright blue eyes directly onto yours. The intensity of his focus was so raw, so completely unshielded, that it felt like he was reaching right through the space between you.

"But the hardest part wasn't the silence," he whispered, his voice dropping so low it vibrated right in your chest. "It was the numbness. Not being able to feel a single thing. No heat, no cold, no touch. Just drifting through this endless, gray blur where you don't matter to anyone, and nothing matters to you."

Slowly, his translucent hand lifted from his lap, hovering just an inch above the plush blanket you had brought him. His fingers trembled ever so slightly against the cool air, tracing the texture of the fabric without actually making contact. A gentle, quiet silence settled over the room, thick with the unsaid, stretching between the two ends of the couch like a fragile thread.

Leon didn’t rush to fill it. He just looked at the blanket, a faint, reverent smile touching his lips before his bright blue eyes drifted back up to lock onto yours. The raw vulnerability from a moment ago didn't vanish, but it shifted, a spark of his signature, boyish playfulness cutting through the heavy atmosphere.

"You know," he murmured, his deep voice dropping into a low, gravelly rasp that felt entirely too close in the quiet apartment. "As much as I hated watching you get aggressively ambushed by a cardboard box in that closet... I'm starting to think that rogue file cabinet did me a massive favor."

A soft laugh caught in your throat, the emotional weight in your chest lifting just enough for you to let out a breath. "Oh, really? So my physical trauma is your lucky break, Kennedy?"

"Hey, silver linings, sweetheart," Leon chuckled, leaning his head back against the plush pillow you’d given him. He tilted his face toward you, his gaze lingering on your face with a sudden, focused attentiveness. "Speaking of which... How's the head? The warm shower looks like it did wonders, but I can still see a little bit of a pink mark right by your hairline."

Instinctively, your hand flew up to your forehead, your fingers gently brushing over the tender skin. The swelling had definitely gone down, eased by the steam of the bathroom, but your cheeks flared with a different kind of warmth under his steady, perceptive gaze.

"It's fine," you mumbled, offering him a sheepish, defensive look. "It barely even thumps anymore. And for the record, I didn't get ambushed. I was just conducting a highly rigorous, involuntary stress test on the storage equipment."

Leon let out a rich, rumbling laugh that vibrated pleasantly in the small space between you. "An involuntary stress test. Right. Is that what they're teaching analysts at the academy these days? Because from where I was floating, it looked a lot like a straight-up knockout round between you and a box full of decades-old manila folders where the box had won."

"Shut up," you teased, a genuine, radiant smile breaking across your face as you pulled your knees a little closer to your chest. "You're supposed to be a legendary agent, aren't you? Where's the professional courtesy? You're missing a serious opportunity to show some sympathy to your sole provider of a comfortable couch and blankets."

"Oh, I've got plenty of sympathy," Leon countered smoothly. He shifted his weight, lounging back into the cushions with an effortless, devastating grace, a smug, knowing smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. "But I also have a duty to keep you humble, sweetheart. Can’t have you getting a big head. Though I suppose the box already handled that part for me."

You rolled your eyes, but the playful bickering felt like a warm shield, beautifully masking the deeper, terrifyingly intense fondness that was rapidly taking root between you. It was safer this way, hiding the sudden, breathless electricity of his presence behind sharp wits and easy smiles.

"You're terrible," you whispered, the teasing edge in your voice softening into something incredibly tender as you looked at him.

Leon’s smirk slowly faded, rounding out into a soft, genuine expression of peace. He stared back at you, the lingering shadows of his five-year isolation completely overridden by the light-hearted comfort of your living room.

"Yeah, well," Leon whispered, his gaze never leaving yours as the soft music of the city hummed outside the window. "You're still keeping me around, so I must be doing something right."

The soft, rhythmic murmur of the television continued to wash over the living room, a low-stakes backdrop to the quiet comfort that had completely enveloped the space. But as the minutes ticked by, the adrenaline that had carried you through the chaotic encounter on the fourth floor, the tense drive home, and the surreal transition into your apartment finally began to evaporate. The crushing weight of your fourteen-hour shift returned all at once, pressing heavily against your eyelids.

A tiny, involuntary yawn escaped your lips. You tried to smother it behind your hand, but it was too late.

Across the expanse of the couch, Leon didn’t miss a thing. His bright blue eyes, shimmering softly in the amber light of the table lamp, crinkled with quiet amusement. He shifted his weight fluidly, leaning his head back against the plush pillow you had brought him, a lazy, knowing smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

"Looks like the analyst is finally running out of steam," he murmured, his deep voice dropping into a low, gravelly rasp that felt entirely too intimate in the quiet room.

"I'm not," you lied, your voice cracking slightly with sleepiness as you blinked against the heavy haze settling over your brain. You pulled your knees closer to your chest, trying to force yourself to sit up straighter, but your body refused to cooperate. "I'm just... processing the data of the day."

Leon let out a rich, rumbling chuckle that vibrated pleasantly in the tight space between you. "Right. Processing data with your eyes closed. Is that another one of those top-secret Bureau techniques, sweetheart?"

The nickname, spoken with such effortless, casual warmth, sent a final, lingering jolt of electricity down your spine, but it wasn't enough to fight off the sheer exhaustion claiming your limbs. Uncurling your legs, you reluctantly let your feet slip back into your plush slippers. You reached for the remote on the coffee table, your fingers cold against the plastic, and clicked the power button.

The television screen went black, plunging the living room into a deeper, more profound quiet. The ambient light faded, leaving only the warm, golden cone of the table lamp to illuminate the space, casting long, soft shadows across the floorboards and catching the edges of Leon’s translucent, ethereal frame. Your bedroom sat just down the small hallway to the left, a quiet sanctuary waiting for you.

You stood up from the couch, your muscles aching with a deeply satisfying weariness. Turning back to look at the legendary agent, you smoothed down the front of your oversized t-shirt.

"I'm calling it a night, Kennedy," you said softly, your voice thick with sleep. You offered him a tender, tired smile. "The couch is all yours. Try not to haunt the place too loudly while I'm asleep."

Leon looked up at you from his position on the cushions, his expression softening completely. The playful, sarcastic armor he usually wore so tightly dissolved in the amber light, leaving behind a raw, exposed sincerity that made your breath catch.

"Goodnight," you added gently, the word slipping past your lips naturally, an instinctual courtesy extended to a welcome guest. "Goodnight, Leon."

The phantom agent froze. His chest remained perfectly still, his breath catching in his throat as the simple phrase hung in the quiet air between you. For a second, his glowing blue eyes widened slightly, a profound, heavy silence settling over him.

To you, it was just a standard phrase to end the evening. But to Leon, those two simple words carried the crushing weight of a lifetime. He stared at you, his mind frantically scrambling through the archives of his own memories, trying to find the last time someone had genuinely wished him a peaceful rest. He couldn't remember. He spent five years as a phantom, an invisible vapor drifting through the cold, clinical halls of the FBI building where no one even knew he existed. But even before that, back when he was alive, back when he was running from one world-ending bio-weapon to the next, surviving on adrenaline, cheap coffee, and cheap motels, there had been no one waiting for him at the end of the day. No one to turn off the lights with. No one to say goodnight to him.

The realization hit him like a physical blow, a sudden, devastating wave of emotion blooming right behind his ribs. It was an incredibly simple human interaction, yet it felt like the most profound luxury he had ever been granted.

"Goodnight, sweetheart," Leon whispered. His voice was lower than usual, thick with a gravelly, raw emotion that he couldn't completely mask. A genuine, heartachingly handsome smile spread across his face, rich with a newfound, terrifyingly deep peace. "Sleep well."

You nodded, your heart swelling with a tender warmth at the sheer gravity in his eyes. Turning away, you padded softly across the rug and turned down the short hallway to the left, stepping past the kitchen island and entering the privacy of your bedroom.

You closed the door halfway, leaving it cracked just an inch, a subconscious tether to the living room. Sliding beneath the heavy, cool sheets of your bed, you let out a long sigh as your head sank into the pillow. The room was dark, save for the faint sliver of amber light cutting through the cracked door from the living room lamp. You closed your eyes, fully expecting to drop into a deep, dreamless sleep within seconds.

But sleep didn't come.

Instead, your mind was violently alive, your thoughts spinning in a breathless, dizzying loop. Your chest felt tight, humming with a strange, sweet nervousness that made your heart beat a little too fast against your ribs. Every time you closed your eyes, all you could see was the way the gold light of the lamp had traced the sharp line of Leon's jaw. All you could hear was the low, rumbling resonance of his chuckle, and the dangerous, intoxicating way the word sweetheart had rolled off his tongue.

You rolled over onto your side, pulling the blanket up to your chin, a helpless, quiet smile breaking across your face in the dark. It was completely absurd. You were a logical, level-headed federal investigator, and you were currently losing sleep over a ghost. A man who was technically a classified anomaly, a phantom sleeping on your couch. Yet, the memory of his translucent hand hovering over the blanket, trembling with a raw desire to just be anchored to the world—to you—made your stomach flip in a way it hadn't in years. A fragile, beautiful warmth was taking root deep in your soul, and you knew, with a sudden cinematic clarity, that your life would never be the same again.

Out in the living room, the quiet was absolute.

Leon remained exactly where you had left him, leaning his head back against the plush pillow. He reached over, his weightless hand passing effortlessly through the fabric of the fuzzy throw blanket you had brought him. He couldn't physically feel the heat of the fleece, but as he stared at the folds of the material, that same emotional warmth he had felt in the archive room began to radiate through his spectral form.

He didn't need to sleep. He didn't need to close his eyes to rest. But tonight, he didn't care about the logistics of his ghost mechanics.

Slowly, Leon turned his head toward the small hallway on the left, his bright, glowing blue eyes tracing the faint, cracked line of light coming from your bedroom door. He could hear the faint, rhythmic rustle of your sheets as you tossed and turned, a sound so devastatingly human it made his chest ache with a sudden, fierce protectiveness.

He had spent five years wishing for an escape, wishing for a way out of the gray, numb limbo he had been cursed to wander. But sitting here in the quiet twilight of your apartment, surrounded by the scent of vanilla and clean laundry, Leon realized he didn't want to disappear anymore. He wanted to stay right here.

A lazy, tender smile spread across his face in the dark, his fingers curling slightly against the air as if he were still holding your hand in the dust of the fourth floor. For the first time in five years, he wasn't running, he wasn't fighting, and he wasn't alone. He was exactly where he wanted to be, anchored to the living world by the quiet breathing of the woman sleeping just down the hall.

DIVIDERS' CREDIT: @uzmacchiato

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