𝔅𝔞𝔠𝔨 𝔱𝔬 𝔥𝔦𝔪 Leon Kennedy x male reader
Summary: with wrath beyond human limits, Leon takes matters in his own hands to take down anything left of the Umbrella just to save and finally have you at his side.
Tags: No use of Y/N. Male reader. Dark Leon S Kennedy: dangerous, lethal and charming. Flirting. Possessive behavior. Obsessive behavior. Overprotectiveness. Gore. Protective Leon Kennedy. Kissing. Intimate moments. Gore. Minor character deaths. Some bloody kisses. Happy ending.
This was meant to be the last part but it ended up too long oops
ℳ𝒶𝓈𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉 - gif - 𝒫𝓇ℯ𝓋𝒾ℴ𝓊𝓈 𝓅𝒶𝓇𝓉
Words count: 10k
Once threatening hulking monster with massive, bone-crushing claws and exposed muscles, now lying on the ground in a large lake of it’s own blood all leaking profoundly from that massively enlarged, pulsating heart Leon had too much joy in striking down repeatedly with his hatchet.
The perfect way to unleash all the wrath that had built up in him at witness that matrix-clone man dressed in all white steal you from him along with Grace’s unconscious body.
The Tyrant’s knee had buckled from a clean shot of Leon’s Requiem and the chest cavity yawned out into the dim air, that grotesque, surgically-stitched opening where the Umbrella technicians had welded the ribs apart and reinforced the ventricles with some black cabling that pulsed wetly along with the beat.
The heart sat there fully exposed, swollen to roughly the size of a man’s skull, slick with a film of mucus-thick fluid. Each beat made it lurch forward against its own webbing of veins, fat arteries throbbing and visibly distending with every contraction, surface twitching with smaller spasms beneath.
The hatchet in Leon’s hand came up from his hip in a drawing arc, blade still wet from earlier kills and catching light and the first swing landed dead center of the heart.
Blade sinking past the outer wall and into the dense, thickened myocardium beneath and a fat jet of arterial red geysered up out of the split, slapping across Leon’s forearm, his chest, the underside of his jaw. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t blink. He just twisted the haft, ripped the blade free with a thick suctioning pop that dragged a long ribbon of clotted tissue out with it, and brought it down again.
The second swing took out a chunk of heart wall the size of a fist and it slapped onto the floor beside the Tyrant’s knee.
Blood spurted out of the new crater in long, pulsing waves timed to the failing beat below and Leon stepped right into the spray as it hit him across the face.
The Tyrant tried to lift its arm and Leon shifted his weight, pivoted half a step left without ever taking the hatchet off the chest and brought the blade down a third time at an angle that split the upper chamber wide open.
A great fat bubble of blood bulged up from the wound that rose rapidly, dome of it stretching the ruptured pericardium outward as the failing pump shoved everything it had through holes that couldn’t hold pressure anymore.
The membrane stretched and then it burst with a wet pat that drenched Leon from collarbone to belt buckle in a sheet of copper-stinking fluid.
Yet he didn’t stop, rapid strikes of his hatchet that rose and fell with a metronome cruelty, each impact carving deeper as the blade kept hitting saturated muscle.
He chopped at the heart, knuckles going white through the leather of his gloves.
A coronary artery, ruptured by the third hit, hosed a thin pressurized thread of blood up across his cheek.
The Tyrant’s body jerked hard and whatever pseudo-life kept the thing animate started to flicker out behind the eyes, filmy gray-white globes losing focus.
By the tenth there was nothing left to call a heart, more a churned-up slurry of fibrous strands and hardened myocardial tissue mashed in with blood clots and stripped vein casings.
A final swing, harder than the rest, drove the hatchet head straight through what pulp remained and cracked into the spinal cord behind it.
That was when the Tyrant finally went all the way down, impact pressing what was left of the heart out the front of the cavity in a thick, paste-like extrusion that oozed across the floor.
Blood spread in a lake that widened out from under the body, finding and filling the low spots in the tile. The hulking thing that ten minutes ago stalked Leon through the ruined RPD station was now no longer moving again.
Leon stood over it, chest heaving and blood dripping from the hatchet head in heavy, syrup-thick drops.
His shoulders rose and fell, jaw working as the corner of his mouth had pulled up at some point during the assault.
It dropped just as fast because you were gone and that was the only thought that made him lower the hatchet.
All the rage hadn’t cleaned anything out of him, it just made a hole big enough to see clearly through and what he saw on the other side was the empty space where you had been pressed up against the wall with Zeno’s hand on your throat.
He turned and ran.
Raccoon City was still a corpse the explosion hadn’t buried but almost finished decomposing.
The streets here were worse than where you had ridden in, blast punching whole blocks down into themselves as he cut across the courtyard of the RPD without slowing, vaulted a chunk of fallen façade, hit the cracked street running.
He keyed the comm without breaking stride.
"Sherry."
A click. "Leon, where—"
"Zeno took Grace. He's headed underground, has to be, there's nothing else this far in."
A pause on her end as he could hear her typing on her keyboard.
"The blast site exposed sublevels, an old Umbrella infrastructure. There's a lab on the schematic I pulled, I can route it to your HUD—"
"Send it, Sherry."
She sent it along with also saying something else and he didn't answer, boots carrying him toward the exposed crater two blocks east where the road had collapsed into a ragged mouth in the earth.
Get him back.
That was the only sentence in his head and it kept saying itself in different voices,
Don't think about Grace, you'll get to her, get him back first. Don't think about how long it's been, don't think about Zeno's hand on his throat.
Get him back.
He reached the lip of the crater and didn't slow, drop of sixty feet at least, vertical.
There was a rope left by someone, BSAA probably, who had bolted an anchor into a slab of standing concrete and let a thick fibrous line trail down into the dark.
He went down hand over hand fast enough that the friction burned through the leather in his palms before he was halfway.
The drop swallowed the daylight in stages, pale yellow at the top, gray a third of the way down, then nothing but darkness.
The thought he didn't want crawled up through him on the run.
Whatever they had been doing to you in that care center, whatever they had been growing in your blood, was the entire reason a man like Zeno had moved at superhuman speed across a room to put a hand on your throat.
Gideon had to hunt you across half a city for it because of Spencer's research.
You were carrying something but he didn't know what Elpis was, just that Umbrella wanted it and he knew what the protocol was, on paper, for a confirmed bioweapon vector.
The thought made him grind his teeth so hard a muscle in his jaw spasmed.
No, if you were a weapon you'd have used it anytime he had lowered his attention like when his arms locked around you or in the back of the bike with your face pressed between his shoulder blades and your hands flat on his abdomen.
Could have used it in the kiss when instead you leaned in, breath shaking, lips chapped as the whole of you tilted toward him.
Failed experiment.
The phrase formed and he winced visibly, alone in the dark, jaw clenched.
Failed implied you were a prototype they'd thrown out and that had survived in the trash.
He hated the word the second it touched the inside of his skull and take the hatchet to his own neck for thinking it if he wasn't the only set of hands you had left in the world right now.
So he kept running.
The vines started about a hundred yards in, hanging in thick black-green ropes that swayed slightly in air, whole growth alive in the wrong way and he could see the long fibrous bodies of the vines pulse the way a throat pulses when it swallows.
One of them moved and he brought the hatchet up to drive it through the base of the strand where it joined the ceiling and the cut released a hiss of pressurized sap, dark green that splattered across the floor in a hot puddle.
The vine dropped, twitched, curled in on itself like a worm.
The next two snapped at him and he cut through both in a single sweep.
As the corridor narrowed and the vines thickened, he stopped using the hatchet for individual strands and started using it like a machete, blade rising and falling in rough, economical arcs that cleared a path two feet wide and left the floor behind him slicked with sap and severed lengths of twitching plant matter.
The thing at the heart of the growth was huge, flower-mouth the size of his bulky body, so many vines-tentacles everywhere as he unloaded everything he had on the plant and behind it, a row of red barrels were stacked inside a canister.
Leon drew the Requiem and lifted it two-handed, settled the front sight in the soft pulpy dead-center of the bloom and started firing.
The third ammo he put square in the stamen, which split lengthwise, made the floor under his boots slick with green liquid.
The smell was somewhere between rotting fruit and ammonia and it crawled into his sinuses and refused to leave.
Ninth shoots in, the flower tried, one last time, to lash a vine at him and a great wet bolus of green bursts out of its mouth, fully exposed now red barrels now.
He swapped the magnum for his sidearm without taking his eyes off them and fired one round and the world went orange.
The blast climbed the wall, found the vine system and went up everything at once. Fire raced up the strands of plant matter in fast bright capillary lines, every vine that had been hanging from the ceiling becoming a fuse, the whole organism igniting in a chain reaction that swept along the corridor.
Leon stood there for half a beat in the heat of it and watched until the plant collapsed and he stepped through.
Fluorescent emergency lights glowing past the large door of the lab located underneath Raccon City, the Ark.
Cold and sterile air rolled up out of it.
The first thing that came back was the cold.
Your fingers were the first to register it because they were the furthest from your heart and the closest to the metal of whatever you were lying on and, the second your nerves bothered to acknowledge them they reported back that the table beneath you was the same temperature as the air.
Eyes opening in pieces from the light overhead particular flat white that meant fluorescents. It needled into your retinas through lashes that felt glued together and for a long moment all you could do was lie there blinking up at a ceiling made of perforated white panels, every one of them identical.
Then you tried to move your hand but your wrist was held.
A wide cuff of dark, padded restraint had been buckled across the joint, attached by a short tether to a ring welded into the side of the gurney.
You tilted your head slowly, both wrists and ankles along a wider strap across your hips, one thinner across your sternum under the collarbones.
The clothes Leon had thrown you outside the gas station were gone, now in something thin and pale gray, hospital-issue, paper-fragile, slit down one side to give the cannulas access.
Two thick translucent tubes, one in the crook of each elbow, taped down with that yellowish surgical adhesive that always left a sting when it came off. The tubes ran from your veins to a pair of small upright machines on either side of the gurney, both humming faintly and with a glass collection chamber on the front that was already three-quarters full of blood.
The chambers were still filling.
You watched, for a second, as a fresh thread of red eased down the tube on your right side, traveled the loop and dropped with a small wet pat into the collection vessel.
A headache had taken up residence behind your eyes.
The room was empty, no lab coats pr guards.
Whatever had been done to put you under had been considered sufficient so they had sedated you.
You weren't supposed to be awake at all but something in your blood disagreed.
You worked your right hand first because it was the better hand at the moment, cuff padded but the buckle was on the outside, near the edge of the table and if you turned your wrist hard against the strap, twisted the meat of your forearm until the skin burned and the cannula tugged sharply at the vein, you could just barely angle your thumb enough to reach the prong of the buckle.
It took three tries before your thumb caught the metal lip and shoved, strap slackening with a quiet leather sigh.
The machines were still humming and an headache was still drumming as you pulled your hand free.
The first thing it did was go to the cannula in your other arm. You didn't trust yourself to pull the needle out of your own vein with the elegance the situation deserved, so you didn't try for elegance.
You braced two fingers above the insertion point, pinched the skin to hold the vein in place and drew the cannula out in one slow, queasy motion. The needle came clear with a small sucking pop and a fresh bead of red welled up out of the puncture as you clamped your thumb over it immediately and held pressure.
The pump on that side kept trying to draw for another second before it registered the loss of fluid and gave a small mechanical chirp of confusion, the indicator light blinking yellow.
You found the power switch on its housing and slapped it off before working the strap on your other wrist with the freed hand, then the chest strap and hip strap before finally freeing both ankles.
Your fingers kept fumbling and losing instructions halfway through, you had to keep stopping to breathe, slow and deep, against the rising static in your head.
The second cannula came out the same way as the first and the room went quiet without the pumps.
You sat up and that was when the headache became a real thing instead of a background noise. Sitting up sent it surging forward into the front of your skull in a sloshing wave and you had to brace both hands flat on the gurney and just exist for a moment while the world reassembled itself around you.
Your stomach turned over once and decided, generously, not to do anything about it.
Easing your legs over the side of the gurney, the floor was the same nothing-temperature as the table.
You kept one palm pressed against the inside of your elbow, holding pressure over the puncture there and you used the other hand to push yourself upright onto your feet.
The first step almost put you on the floor as you caught the edge of the gurney with your free hand at the last second, knees buckling and stood there shaking until your legs remembered what they were for.
The hospital gown swayed around and the slit down one side let a draft of the cold air touch your hip in a way that made you very suddenly aware of how little of you was being protected from anything.
The room was big, white walls and floor, every surface either tile or polished metal.
There were three other gurneys in the room.
Two were empty, one was not.
But before you let your eyes go to that one, your eyes went down, because your foot had landed in something.
Up close, you could see the long dark smears along the tile leading from somewhere out of sight, curving past the foot of your own gurney, disappearing under the third bed.
Some of the smears were almost black, dried in tacky films that had cracked at the edges while others were fresher, sitting in shallow round pools that hadn't lost their gloss yet, surface tension still intact as a faint reflection of the overhead fluorescents trembled.
Blood in the wrong volume.
Someone had bled here recently and at length.
You raised your eyes slowly and made yourself look at the double doors at the far end of the room. White metal, taller than they needed to be, set with rectangular green panels at chest height that pulsed faintly.
An exit.
You took a step toward it and your free hand stayed clamped over your inner elbow because the puncture there kept thinking about leaking and you didn't have the resources to spare.
You made it three steps before you saw the figure on the third gurney and stopped.
The frame was small, child-like and curled slightly on their side in sleep.
Gray-white hair, longer than you remembered, fell across the pillow in tangled waves that had clearly not been brushed in a while.
"Emily?"
The word came out of you before you'd checked it. Soft, cracked at the edges from a throat that hadn't spoken in hours and you moved toward the gurney faster than your legs really wanted to, headache swinging behind your eyes.
It wasn't Emily, the realization came in pieces the further you looked.
Face the right shape but the proportions were wrong, face sharper in the cheekbones and very pale, the blue tracery of veins visible at the temple and at the inside of the wrist.
You stared at her jaw because her skin sat slightly loose at the hinge, in the faint pucker of scar tissue along the line of the lower mandible, as if the mouth had been stretched to a width that the muscle remembered even after the bone had retreated.
The proportions had pulled themselves back from something with teeth too wide and the soft architecture of a child's face had been reassembled on top of the damage with the visible seams of the repair still showing.
Her arms lay long at her sides, forearms longer than they should have been on a frame that small and the fingers were tipped with dark nails.
Silvery scars running in fine parallel lines across the side of her neck, fanning out over the collarbones and climbing the inside of the forearms.
A monitor at the head of her bed traced a steady green sawtooth across its screen. The number above it reads 64, a child's heart should beat faster than that.
She was healing.
"Marie," you whispered her name and she didn't wake.
You moved fast as you could with your blood three-quarters of where it belonged and the headache pulsing in time with your steps.
The cannulas in her arms were smaller than the ones that had been in yours, child-sized and more careful, tubes running to a smaller version of the same machine that had been bleeding.
You went to the right side first, pinched her skin the way you'd pinched your own and eased the needle out.
The pump chirped its little confused chirp and you shut it off before doing the same to the left.
The straps you couldn't do because they had been pulled tighter, with the extra holes in the leather worn dark from frequent use along a small steel padlock through the buckle on each wrist.
Someone had decided that whatever she had been was bad enough to warrant the lock even after she'd stopped being it.
You couldn't get her out and the realization sat in your stomach.
Crouching down beside her bed there were notes scattered, several pages of them had clearly been clipped to a board and dropped when the board was set down too quickly, white sheets fanned across the tile under the gurney, some of them face down, some of them face up, a few of them spotted with rust-colored droplets at the corners.
You gathered them with your free hand, careful to keep your other hand pressed to your elbow as you sat back on your heels and the fluorescents overhead buzzed while laying the pages out on the floor.
ARK RESEARCH COMPLEX DIVISION OF ADVANCED BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS INTERNAL RESEARCH MEMORANDUM
FILE ID: ARK-ØØ-77A SUBJECT: Experiment ØØ / Elpis Expression Event AUTHOR: Dr. Adrian Gideon CLASSIFICATION: DIRECTOR ACCESS ONLY
The activation event observed in Experiment ØØ following exposure to Subject 170 has fundamentally altered our understanding of the entity designated ELPIS.
For decades, recovered Spencer archives suggested ELPIS represented a biological weapon system. All available documentation implied it was designed to interact with Progenitor-derived organisms in a manner significant enough to warrant extreme secrecy.
We now believe this assumption was incorrect.
Current evidence suggests ELPIS is not a weapon.
At least, not in the conventional sense.
The original Elpis Host Program was built around a simple hypothesis: If ELPIS was biological in nature, then Experiment ØØ’s blood would eventually become its production source.
This appears to be exactly what occurred.
Analysis performed before the Subject 170 exposure event showed only dormant genetic structures embedded within Experiment ØØ’s hematopoietic stem cells.
These cells reside primarily within bone marrow and function as the source of all blood cell production.
Following infection exposure, those dormant structures activated.
Since activation, every blood sample collected from Experiment ØØ has demonstrated continuous production of previously unidentified proteins not naturally occurring in humans nor do they resemble any known viral structures.
Instead, they appear to function as biological regulators.
They identify abnormal cellular activity and selectively target infected tissue while leaving healthy cells largely unharmed.
This process is extraordinarily complex and appears to involve several mechanisms acting simultaneously.
Because of this, blood extraction became the primary focus of Ark personnel.
SUBJECT 170
UNEXPECTED RESPONSE
The greatest surprise occurred during testing on Subject 170.
Prior assumptions predicted one of two outcomes.
Either:
ELPIS would destroy infected tissue entirely.
Or:
ELPIS would accelerate mutation.
Neither occurred.
Instead, Subject 170 began recovering.
Repeated exposure to proteins extracted from Experiment ØØ’s blood produced measurable changes.
Aggressive cellular growth slowed, abnormal viral replication decreased and damaged tissue began reorganizing itself.
Most importantly, healthy human cells started outcompeting infected cells.
The process resembles guided healing rather than eradication.
This finding forced a complete reevaluation of ELPIS.
CURRENT THEORY
We believe ELPIS appears to function as a biological correction system.
ELPIS identifies what a cell was originally supposed to be.
It then encourages damaged tissue to return toward that state.
Normal antiviral drugs attempt to destroy pathogens.
ELPIS appears to restore biological stability.
Subject 170’s recovery strongly suggests ELPIS was never intended to create stronger monsters.
It was likely designed to prevent biological collapse after infection.
If this interpretation is correct, Spencer may have hidden the greatest antiviral technology ever developed inside a human host, ready to set anarchy.
CHANGES OBSERVED IN EXPERIMENT ØØ
Activation has not occurred without consequences.
Experiment ØØ no longer presents entirely baseline human physiology.
The following alterations have been consistently documented.
Increased Cellular Repair
Minor injuries heal noticeably faster than expected.
Cuts close sooner.
Bruising fades more rapidly.
Inflammatory responses resolve in reduced time.
This effect remains limited.
The subject is not immortal.
Severe trauma remains dangerous.
However, recovery rates exceed normal human averages.
Elevated Metabolic Demand
The continuous production of ELPIS requires substantial biological resources and subject now consumes significantly more energy than before activation.
Expected symptoms include:
frequent hunger
increased thirst
fatigue
accelerated exhaustion during periods of stress
Laboratory personnel have compared the effect to running a small factory inside the body twenty-four hours a day.
Chronic Low-Grade Fever
The immune system remains in a partially activated state.
As a result, body temperature trends slightly above standard human averages.
Most individuals would interpret this as a mild persistent fever.
The subject may experience:
feelings of warmth
occasional sweating
increased sensitivity to dehydration
These effects are expected to persist indefinitely.
Neurological Adaptation Period
The activation event appears to have placed extraordinary stress on the nervous system.
Weeks or months of adjustment may follow.
Reported symptoms include:
dizziness
headaches
temporary confusion
sensory overload in crowded environments
disrupted sleep cycles
Fortunately, these symptoms appear to lessen over time.
POSSIBLE LONG-TERM RISKS
Several concerns remain unresolved.
Autoimmune Activity
Because ELPIS actively monitors cellular abnormalities, there is concern that the system may occasionally misidentify healthy tissue.
If this occurs, autoimmune complications could develop.
Current evidence remains inconclusive.
Bone Marrow Exhaustion
Experiment ØØ’s bone marrow is operating at activity levels never observed in an ordinary human.
Decades of continuous production could potentially result in cellular degradation.
Whether ELPIS can compensate for this damage remains unknown.
END OF FILE ARCHIVE STATUS: LOCKED LAST ACCESSED: 03:17 AM
You read them twice, the second time slower, mouthing some of the words to yourself because your brain kept wanting to refuse what you were seeing. By the time you reached the bottom of the last page the headache had spread from behind your eyes into the base of your skull and your hands had started to tremble.
You folded the pages and slid them inside the front of the hospital gown, against your skin where the strap of nothing held them in place but the press of fabric against your chest. You stood and had to brace yourself on Marie's gurney to do it from headache and dizziness.
You reached down and took her cold hand, smaller than yours.
"I'll be back," you said quietly. "I'll bring help, I promise."
For a long moment she didn't move until her fingers, slow and weak as your own, closed around yours.
Something hot pushed up the back of your throat and you forced it down because it was the only option available.
Turning away from the gurney before the turning got harder.
There was a stainless steel tray on the cart beside her bed, the kind labs use to hold instruments mid-procedure. On it, in a foam holder, were two small glass tubes.
Each one was capped with a small clear plastic housing that held a thin retractable needle, the kind that was meant for fast field injection. Inside each tube, dark and slow, was a finger's-width of your blood, drawn off and prepped for testing.
The logic came to you in stages.
They had been draining you in volume for a reason. Whatever was in your blood was, apparently, the thing keeping the small girl on the table from being a monster anymore.
Whatever was in your blood, then, was a weapon you were already carrying, whether or not you understood the shape of it, whether or not you understood the cost of using it.
If something with the wrong biology came at you in the next hour, the tubes would be the difference between dying and not, hence why you took them.
One went into the small pocket sewn into the side of the gown while the other you held in your right hand, cap clicking shut and the needle retracted.
You started for the doors and doors registered your presence when you got within a meter of them.
The green panels brightened from standby to full and the doors slid open with a soft pneumatic huff.
You walked through and stopped as the corridor held many incubator tanks very tall, each one lit from inside by a steady, sullen red glow and inside each one, suspended in a pale, viscous fluid that was somewhere between water and oil, floated a thing.
A brain was fully exposed at head level, its grey-pink folds visible through the red-tinted fluid.
Beneath the exposed brain, a mouth wide and hinged too far back along the jaw, lined with rows of thin, glassy fangs.
Lickers that felt alive to you as you walked and kept your eyes forward.
Some of the things in the tanks shifted as you passed and made you increase your movement speed as much as possible.
Past the elevator, the corridor continued through another set of double doors and, as you closed the distance you could see the green panels at chest height on those doors brighten from standby to full.
The doors slid open and two men stepped through, black tactical gear and gas masks on.
The lenses of the masks were dark and turned their faces into smooth, expressionless ovals. Rifles slung loose at their fronts, held in the relaxed grip of two men in the middle of a conversation.
They saw you and the change was instant.
Hand that had been gesturing came down, two rifles coming up in unison and the red dots of two laser sights bloomed against the front of your hospital gown.
"Hey—"
"What the fuck are you doing out of containment?"
"Get on the ground, now!"
The shouting hit you like harshly and you broke sideways on instinct and whatever scrap of adrenaline your bloodstream had been hoarding for an emergency, putting the nearest incubator between yourself and the rifles before either of them had finished the second word of the next command.
The first burst of rifle fire cracked through the chamber and chewed a line of impacts along the wall behind where you had been standing as you ran.
More a staggering, lurching forward motion that approximated running closely enough to count and you kept the bulk of the incubators between you and the soldiers, threading the gaps where you could, the red light from the tanks washing over you in pulses as you passed each one.
The shouting kept pace behind you, two voices now, splitting up, one moving along your left to flank, one staying on your right and firing in disciplined controlled bursts whenever he had even half a sight picture.
A bullet hit the glass of the tank to your immediate left and didn't punch through, glass thicker than civilian glass.
The thing inside the tank jerked, its long tongue snapped tight inside its mouth.
The elevator was thirty meters away but you couldn’t keep up.
Your eyes scanned and they caught on a panel mounted to the side of the incubator three to your right.
DRAIN / RELEASE.
You hit the green button as you passed it and ducked behind the next incubator, pressed your back against its base and listened.
The tank behind you began to drain in a loud, mechanical gurgle, suspension fluid being sucked out of the bottom of the cylinder fast, red light inside the tank flickering as the level dropped and the thing inside crouched at the bottom of the glass on its haunches, brain dripping, lipless mouth working, eyeless face turning in slow blind sweeps.
The glass at the front of the tank hissed and split along a seam and the Licker came out of the gap before the seam had even finished opening.
Its head whipped toward the soldier on the right because he had just opened fire on it, muzzle flash strobing across the wet exposed brain.
Long tongue whipping out and around the man's neck on the way in and the impact took both of them down into the gap between two tanks in a tangle that made noises you did not stop to identify.
The second soldier swung his rifle to cover and the wild burst went high to the side and stitched across the front of the next incubator down the line.
That glass cracked and broke apart in a sheet of red-tinted fluid, what tumbled out of it was a pale-skinned humanoid shapes covered in clusters of swollen white pustules that ruptured wetly on impact with the floor, spraying milky pus across the tile.
A genocide started as more capsules broke down and revealed many more creatures.
The elevator door was right there and you slapped your free hand against the call panel, doors opening immediately, already on this floor.
You stumbled inside and hit the first button you saw on the panel without reading the label and you watched through the closing gap of the elevator doors as one of the soldiers came staggering backward into your line of sight with his rifle gone and his sidearm half-drawn and a ring of the pustuled humanoids closing on him.
The other soldier came briefly into view as well, except he was missing most of his right arm at the shoulder, limb torn off and lying several feet from his body.
The elevator doors finished closing and the screaming cut out.
You stood there in the small bright box of the elevator, alone, hands shaking, blood beading slowly at your inner elbow where the gauze you didn't have wasn't doing its job, leaning your back against the wall and slid down it a few inches before catching yourself and forcing yourself upright again.
The headache had a fever now, feeling the heat building behind your eyes.
Elevator stopped suddenly and the doors opened.
You stepped out and almost went to your knees.
The room beyond was vast, ceiling high, vaulted and lit by a single huge pulsing orange light at its apex.
The walls curved outward into a roughly circular shape and set into those walls, dozens of them, hundreds maybe, were dark glass orbs, each one inset flush with the wall.
In the center of the room, raised on a low circular dais, was a device with Zeno standing beside it.
White suit, untouched by the violence of the city. His head was tilted slightly downward toward the device on the dais, gloved hands at his side and yellow glow behind his lenses visible from across the room.
You took a step backward without meaning to, elevator doors already sliding shut behind you as you tried to bring the syringe-tube up in your hand into something resembling a defensive posture.
A hand clapped over your mouth from behind hard.
Tactical glove with fingers that spread wide and pressed your jaw closed before you could draw enough breath to make a sound.
At the same time something cold and sharp settled in against the side of your throat just under the angle of your jaw.
A grey hatchet, not Leon's.
"Got Experiment ØØ. Alive. Holding position, awaiting orders." The voice that spoke beside your ear came muffled through a gas mask, electronic at the edges, calm in the middle.
The radio crackled against the side of the masked man's helmet and a second voice came through.
"—negative on neutralization. Subject is needed intact. Bring him back to harvest. Repeat, bring it back to harvest. Sedate if it gets aggressive."
The man behind you made a single low grunt of confirmation in the back of his throat and then his mouth came close enough to your ear that you could feel the warmth of his breath escaping the mask's exhaust port against the rim of your skin.
"You heard," he said. "On your feet. You walk where I walk and if you so much as twitch in a direction I don't like I take a leg off at the knee. Are we clear."
He didn't wait for an answer as the hand on your mouth slid down to clamp across the front of your throat instead, fingers spread wide enough to circle the column of muscle there and the hatchet came off your jaw, ready against your back.
He turned you with a small twist of his hips and made you face the hallway.
Another set of two doors that opened and revealed a long white corridor on the other side of the room with the windowed wall stretching down its length.
What was directly in front of you was Leon standing maybe ten meters down the corridor.
His face, always closed and flat, had his mouth softening the second his blues eyes spotted you, brow knit forward.
Pure hatred while looking at the man holding you.
"Let him go," Leon said. "And we can talk about your pension."
The man behind you laughed drily, processed by the mask's electronics into something flat and unpleasant.
The hatchet in his off hand slid back up from your back and he raised it slowly until the flat of the blade was pressed against the side of your neck again.
You felt the skin part as a thin warmth slid down your throat, traced the line of your collarbone and disappeared into the slit of the hospital gown.
"I'm going to neutralize the target," the man said into his radio, eyes locked on Leon over the curve of your shoulder. "Send the second team to recover the asset. Out."
He didn't wait for a response, his hand snapped up to the back of your neck instead, fingers digging into the muscle there, finding the knot of nerves at the base of your skull and pressing on them with practiced precision.
He used the leverage to walk you, one stumbling half-step at a time, directly down the corridor toward Leon with his hatchet staying against your neck. He kept his body angled behind yours, head tucked down behind the curve of your shoulder, chest plate flush against your back.
Using you like a meat shield all the way down the corridor, Leon's gun wavered because he didn’t have a clear shot on the way.
The man behind you reached the last few meters in a sudden burst and shoved you forward brutally.
Leon caught you, arm coming across your middle in a single clean sweep, bicep underneath the leather of his jacket bunching tight against your stomach, flat of his forearm settling under your ribs in the place a man's forearm settles when he's scooped someone out of a fall a hundred times before and the rest of him met the rest of you.
He was warm through the layers of his clothing and through the thin paper of your hospital gown, chest a wall, plates of his pectorals hard under his shirt as they met the side of your face for a single second as he yanked you in tight against him and you could feel the slow heavy thud of his heart beating against your cheekbone.
His other arm, the one with the gun, locked around your shoulders to keep you from rebounding off him.
It lasted a second or maybe less as his head jerked up over your shoulder and his entire body went rigid against yours, he made a small noise in his throat and his arm uncoiled from around your back, hand on your shoulder shoving you hard sideways into the wall to your right.
You hit the wall with your shoulder too hard with the way he put more strength into the throw than he'd meant to and the impact slammed the breath out of your lungs.
The commander had taken the distraction you caused by trying to slice Leon's neck with his hatchet and the blonde caught the descending haft of the weapon against the slide of the pistol with a metallic crack.
You watched a fight occur from the floor.
The man in the mask was younger and faster, but most importantly not carrying a deadly virus in his system.
Hatchets swung in tight arcs that didn't waste motion and every arc had to be parried by something on Leon.
The third exchange ended with the hatchet's haft slammed across Leon's collarbone and the pistol jarred halfway out of his grip with Leon's back against the windowed wall and the glass exploded outward in a sheet of fragments.
The two bodies vanished through the gap and some of the glass came down with them.
You tried to move, hand finding the floor and your legs accepted the request of getting up as you slumped sideways against the corridor wall.
The door at the far end of the corridor opened and two men came in, same gears as the others
"Show me your hands!"
Raising both of them as high as your shoulder would let you, palms out and fingers spread and you stayed on the floor because standing was no longer something your body would do.
"Don't move," the closer one said.
He approached slowly, rifle steady while the other one held his line at the door and covered the angles.
When he was close enough he reversed his grip on the rifle and brought the stock around in a short, professional arc and it cracked into the side of your head above the ear.
Awareness came back in layers.
Someone was carrying you from the way you were swaying up and down repeatedly and a hard ridge of bone was digging into the soft pit of your stomach.
Boot steps on concrete, dry electronic chatter of a radio on someone's hip.
The smell you registered was so bad that it dragged the rest of you up out of unconsciousness whether you were ready or not.
Old and new blood, the particular sweet-rotten reek of something dead, burnt cordite under all of it.
You stirred.
"Subject's awake." The man carrying you said, voice flat through the mask filter.
The other man, walking a few paces ahead, half-turned without breaking stride. You saw the rifle in his hands, muzzle pointed politely at the floor and over the top of his mask his eyes found yours where you hung limp over his partner's shoulder.
"Already?" he said. "It's been, what, six minutes." He stepped closer, peered at your forehead. The barrel of his rifle drifted up enough to flick your hair away from your temple with the front sight. "Cut's already gone. Look at it… fucking freak."
He turned back around and kept walking while you let your head loll from lack of strength.
The vast warehouse alley with the shipping containers stacked into walls on either side, was wrecked.
Containers split open, some of them caved in from the outside and the floor was a slick of dark fluid pooled in the low places of the concrete.
Three Lickers lying flat with their long red bodies opened up by gunfire and their tongues lolling slack across the floor in pale wet ropes.
Zombies, more than you could count, sprawled in heaps where they'd fallen, some still twitching in the small involuntary way bodies twitched when their nervous systems hadn't gotten the news.
The man carrying you stopped in front of a heavy double door and went down on one knee with practiced care, your bare feet found the cold concrete underneath and you swayed when he let go.
There was a split somewhere on the inside of your cheek where the rifle stock had driven your teeth into the soft tissue and iron sat heavy on your tongue.
"Move," the one with the bored eyes said and gestured with the rifle. "Don't get clever."
The doors hissed open at your approach and you walked through them with the small shuffling steps of a person whose balance had not entirely returned.
Your eyes went to Marie before they went to anything else.
She was still on the gurney exactly the way you had left her.
"On the bed," the man behind you said. "The one with the restraints."
He gestured with the rifle and as he did, the small red dot of his laser sight flickered across the wall in front of you.
Then it vanished between your shoulder blades.
You took a step toward the bed before a sound came from behind you.
A slicing followed by a dry crack of bone giving way along a yell that got cut off halfway through by the mask filter and came out muffled and gurgling.
You spun and found Leon standing between them.
He was standing between the two soldiers and the arm of the soldier who had been pointing his rifle at you was very wrong due to Leon’s hatchet that had come down at the shoulder, splitting through the joint at an angle that had taken the limb most of the way off the torso and now it was hanging by a rope of muscle.
Blood was coming out of the wound in a continuous pour from the severed artery.
The other soldier had started to raise his rifle and gotten it halfway up before Leon moved his hatchet free from the first man's shoulder in a fast clean yank that opened the wound wider and sent a second arterial spray fanning sideways across Leon's chest as his wrist rotated to take the soldier’s throat at the level of the larynx.
The mask filter on the front of his helmet caught the spray and redirected it sideways out the exhaust ports.
Leon let the hatchet drop as he drew the pistol from his hip in the same motion and put two rounds into the back of the first soldier's head.
Both soldiers flopping across the floor, one growing lake of blood.
The shock kept you still for about three seconds before you crossed the floor and both arms came around his ribs, face into the front of his jacket, side of your head jammed up under his collarbone.
He huffed and underneath the leather you felt his ribs flex against the press of your forearms.
The arms that came up around your shoulders to hug you back were strong.
"That's, uh. That's a hell of a lot better than the last greeting I got from you." He murmured into the top of your head and you laughed into the side of his throat.
"I thought you were dead," you said into his shirt.
"I get that a lot."
You pulled back, wanting to look at him but he was already turning, taking your hand in his gloved and large one that engulfed yours completely.
He did not tell you what had happened to the commander like the moment that he had pinned the masked man to the catwalk grating with one knee on his sternum and worked methodically.
First the joint, wrist coming out of his body right after and the blade had to be brought down twice to get all the way through the radius.
The second joint, elbow and the shoulder followed after.
Leon had not stopped working until there was nothing left attached to the torso except the head and he had taken it off last, kicking it through the railing.
What he told you, as he pulled you along by the hand, was the operational picture.
"We don't have time," he said. "Zero's got Grace at the console. He's going to walk her through inserting the password into Elpis. We have to break it before he gets there."
"How does she know the password?"
"She doesn't." A small huff of breath that was almost a laugh, almost. "That gentleman and Gideon have convinced themselves she does. They think she's the key. They'll get a code into the system one way or another and once it's in, Elpis is loose."
He kept walking as you kept up, hand around yours tightening a fraction when you stumbled on the edge of a tile and loosened again the moment you found your footing and the small unspoken attention of it, did something to the part of your chest that was still burning from thinking he was dead.
You reached the elevator and Leon hit the call button with the side of his fist as he pulled you in.
It began to ascend.
In the close quiet of the small mirrored box, with the floor numbers ticking up and the soft hum of the cable above you, you looked up at him and said, "Leon. What if everything we know about Elpis is wrong."
His eyes came down to you.
"Define wrong."
"What if it's not a weapon? There is this little girl I know, Marie, that was turned into a monster but Elpis—"
He was listening and opened his mouth to say something but coughed instead.
Small one at first, throat-clearing, before it doubled and his shoulders hunched in around it, he turned his face away from you in a sharp instinctive motion and when brought his free hand up to cover his mouth, you saw the blood come through his fingers before he could stop it.
Bright red, so arterial.
A lot of it.
His knee went out from under him, the hand that had been bracing on the wall now bracing on the wall lower down and his shoulders shook with the next cough, more blood came through his fingers and a thin runner of it escaped his palm and tracked down his wrist before disappearing into the cuff of his glove.
You went down with him, both of your hands on his shoulders and the leather was fever-hot under your palms.
"Leon, breathe, slow—"
He spat, a red wad of it onto the floor of the elevator.
His head came up, eyes finding yours, whites of them had gone a faint yellow around the iris in the last few minutes, you could see it now in the elevator light and the veins at his temples stood out darker than they should have.
"M'fine," he rasped.
"You are not fucking fine."
"Noted."
The elevator dinged, doors opening on the orange light.
Zeno was standing at the console with a cigarette held loose between two fingers, an orange tip glowing in counterpoint to the orange of the column and Leon fully collapsed.
He went forward out of the elevator and his left knee folded all the way under him and he went down onto both knees and then onto his palms.
You stayed with him, getting an arm under his shoulder and trying to lift but you couldn't on your own.
Grace was already moving the second she entered the place as well and when she got to him she dropped to her knees on his other side without a single second of hesitation.
"Leon. Oh god. Oh god, oh god, oh, get up, get up, come on—"
He grunted while placing one palm against the floor and braced the other around Grace's shoulders. He pushed and got one foot under himself followed by the other.
Between you and Grace, with most of his weight distributed across both of your shoulders and almost none of it on his own legs, you got him standing.
Together you walked him, head bowed between his shoulders and his breath rattling wet in his chest, toes of his boots dragging at the polished floor with every step.
Zeno watched without moving or putting down the cigarette, taking a quick drag of it and letting the smoke out through his nose in two thin streams and his eyes behind the dark glasses followed your progress.
“Any wrong code will do. It’ll destroy Elpis.”
“Let’s try.” Grace mumbled to Leon as you all got closer.
“I can buy you some time.” Leon breathed before coughing once into the side of your hair and you felt the heat of his breath along a small spray of something against your scalp but you didn't flinch.
“Are we sure of what you have in mind to do?” You tried to call out despite how you yourself had no clear clue of what Elpis was fully capable of.
Zeno was eyeing you in particular as you all approached the center and Grace reluctantly let go once she saw you had full grip on Leon.
You sank together with him down on one knee on the ground, his body half-cradled against the front of yours, head dropping forward to land in the curve of your shoulder. He weighed so much more than you had been ready for, muscles still on his frame even with the virus eating him from the inside, settled against you and your arms came around his shoulders to keep him from going further as he stayed there, breathing.
“I-I know the password.” Grace mastered all the courage she could hold as she told Zeno those words and his face, even while wearing sunglasses, lit up.
“Fulfill your destiny, and all will be forgiven.” Zero mumbled while eying the computer.
You held Leon as another hard set of coughing hit him. One hand cradling the back of his skull, other arm locked across his upper back and felt him slowly lean further in, tension going out of his neck, head settling against the curve of your throat.
He liked it.
Small and almost imperceptible nuzzle of his jaw against your collarbone, an unconscious turn of his face deeper into the place between your shoulder and your neck, the wet of his bloody mouth caught against the line of your jaw and dragged when he turned.
A man at the end of his strength taking, for the first time in years, the comfort of being held and not caring anymore who saw him take it.
His stubble was rough as it scratched your throat with every small shift of his head, blood on his lips smearing a sticky warm line from the hinge of your jaw down to your collarbone and his breath came in small wet bursts against your skin.
He was so fever-warm, the heat of him soaking through your gown and through your skin and into your chest where it sat behind your ribs like a stone.
“O-only if you let Leon live.” Grace mustered again all bravery she could.
“Very well.” Zero only spared Leon and you a quick glance before turning to the computer.
He took a final drag of the cigarette and crushed it out on the edge of the console.
"Better be quick, he has little minutes left" Zeno said, eyes moving over you in a single flat sweep. "And the experiment—" the corner of his mouth lifted again, the small private smile, "—is a failed prototype anyway. Aren't you? The connection had hopes for you but your output is unstable, concentration is below threshold. We were going to harvest you to dry and discard the husk."
He gestured at the column of orange light pulsing beside him.
"But now we won't need to. Once Grace inserts the key, we'll have access to the direct font. Elpis itself. The pure article. You—" the smile widened a fraction, "—were a stepping stone we don't need anymore."
Leon's head moved in a slow effortful lift of his chin off the curve of your shoulder and when his face came up into the light his eyes were half-lidded, entire lower half of his face was painted red.
"You put a hand," Leon said, voice rasp as each word came out individually.
"You put a hand on him, I’ll cut every finger off your fucking hand."
He coughed and sprayed a fine red mist across the front of your gown and across his own chin as he hung in your arms with the cough's weight, his shoulders convulsing and when it passed he was heavier than before as his head sagged back down into the crook of your neck of its own accord.
"Leon," you breathed, both of your hands coming up to his face and cradling it, stubble of his jaw scraping your palms, rough warm drag of two days of unshaved beard against the skin of your fingers.
"Leon, save your strength, please."
He breathed a laugh and it lifted one side of his bloody mouth into a crooked sideways grin, white of his teeth filmed with red and his lower lip was split somewhere on the inside and there was a stripe of blood drying into the line of his jaw under your right hand and he looked at you with a half-lidded heavy gaze.
"You're cute," he murmured, "when you worry."
His eyes traveled down your face and settled on your mouth.
"Shame," he said, softer, almost to himself, "I won't get to see it again."
He was telling you, with the matter-of-fact resignation of a man who had done his own math and didn't like the answer, that he was about to die in your arms and he was sorry he wasn't going to get more time to look at your face.
Something inside your chest broke and then, in the broken place, the notes from the room with Marie for Elpis.
The principle had been a cure and you had two ampules stored in the pocket of your gown.
You thought you knew what to do now with Leon's weight collapsing further into your arms by the second and his eyes already starting to drift unfocused on yours.
"Leon," you said and his eyes tracked back to yours with half a second of lag.
"Hmm."
"Can I try something?"
His mouth moved, crooked grin coming back as his pupils were blown widen, eyes on your mouth again and he wasn't tracking the conversation anymore.
"Sweetheart," he murmured. "You can do whatever you want to me."
You leaned in closer, forehead pressed lightly against his and the heat of his skin against yours was alarming. "I want to thank you for getting me out of that Care Center and letting me see all of those new things in my life, even the bad parts. Especially the bad parts. I never—" your voice caught, "—I never had any of that and you gave me a whole day of it."
He made a small contented sound, low in his throat and you felt his hand one curled into the fabric at your hip tighten.
"Best day," he murmured. "Of my whole goddamn life. You believe that?"
You kissed him, mouth finding his and the blood on his mouth transferred immediately onto yours, slick and metallic but you did not care.
His mouth was so warm and so soft and you felt him try to kiss back with how little he had left.
The small fluttering effort of his lips against yours with a half-second of pressure before his strength gave out and he just rested his mouth against yours and breathed.
Your right hand stayed cradling his face while the left hand slid down across his shoulder to your own hip, into the pocket of the gown, fingers closing around the cool slim glass of the first injector.
You worked the safety cap off against the heel of your own palm without interrupting the kiss, finding the line of his carotid by touch, warm pulse of it still beating under his stubbled skin and you set the tip of the injector against the muscle of his shoulder where it met his neck before pressing.
The red dark amber went into him in a single fast pulse and he jerked, a startled flinch against your mouth and for a second nothing happened.
His hand on your hip tightened hard and his other hand came up off the floor and found your shoulder.
A change happened over the span of three seconds as his lips pressed more firmly, opened and his head tilted before he kissed you back more passionately.
The other hand let go of your hip and came up to your face, leather of the glove rough against your cheekbone and he cradled your jaw in his palm to angle your face the way he wanted it and kissed you like.
You felt his weight come off you without noticing how much of it you'd been holding until it was gone and he shifted on his knee, planted his foot, straightened and the weight that had been sagging into your shoulders pulled back as he kissed you harder.
His mouth opened against yours and his tongue traced your lower lip and you opened for him as his tongue slid in.
It tasted like copper and the small surprised noise he made into your mouth as the kiss deepened was the most alive sound you had ever heard out of him. The hand on your face had moved to the back of your skull, fingers spread wide in your hair, holding you to him and the other had found your waist and was gathering the fabric of your gown into his fist as if he didn't know he was doing it.
He pulled back fast, eyes snapping open, breath coming in one sharp clean inhale.
You looked down and his glove came off by your hand, there were once dark spider-web of necrotic veining climbing up from the back of his hand toward his elbow, black branching pattern of the infection spreading through the tissue.
It was gone.
You watched the last of it whiten as you stared, dark lines retreating up his arm in real time, fading from black to gray to a faint shadow to nothing at all, skin beneath them returning to its ordinary color.
He looked down at you and the expression on his face was something you would remember.
