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Off-duty

summary: she’s spent years learning how to disappear into a report. he’s spent one night trying to make sure the room finally sees her. somewhere between the champagne and the woman in red, things stop being simple.

wc: 16,6k (sorry)

taglist ! 🏷️ : leon x femreader!, re4 leon!, slowburn, sfw, frenemies to lovers, military reader!, agent reader!, angry confession, kinda cliché at the end

a/n: omg this took time. I think I read it so much I’m not convinced, but i think it’s ready to finally see the light!!! I’ve written things before, but never with this type of detail. I could do a part 2 if you guys like it! leave comments to see what I should do next. anyway, enjoy 🤭

Damn, you could despise Ada Wong.

Not only had she made your work life miserable, but you also had plenty of reasons. Having to work with Leon meant she was going to appear whenever she felt like it. Okay… she knew Leon way before you did, and maybe those two had more than just casual “encounters” on random missions. But still, you never quite understood why.

The problem with Ada wasn't just that she knew Leon before you did. It was the way she carried herself around him.

Ada had this infuriating ability to act like she was always one step ahead of everyone in the room. She didn't need to raise her voice, demand attention, or prove she was dangerous. She simply walked in, observed everything, and somehow made everyone else feel like they were the ones who didn't belong.

And Leon? Leon never seemed surprised by her.

That was the part that bothered you the most.

You had spent enough time working alongside him to understand the small things nobody else noticed. The way his shoulders relaxed when he finally trusted someone. The way he went quiet when something actually bothered him. The difference between his usual sarcastic comments and the ones he used to avoid a conversation. Spending almost all your time with him made you pick up his habits.

But you knew the current Leon Kennedy. The agent. The golden boy. The man who had been through too much and somehow still managed to make it out alive when things got real ugly. You had been right there beside him.

But Ada knew the Leon Kennedy before all of that. The frustrated first day. The rookie. The vulnerability.

And you hated that you couldn't compete with a history you weren't there for.

The gala was supposed to be simple. For once, there was no mission. No briefing. No emergency call. No reason to memorize exits or check where everyone in the room was standing. But you still did—muscle memory tends to leave its mark.

So you tried to dress as beautifully as possible. A stunning borrowed low-waisted black dress, with subtle rocks that shone whenever they caught the light. You adored how that gown hugged every curve of your body.

After Spain, the government had decided Leon deserved recognition. A formal event, speeches, expensive drinks, important people shaking his hand and telling him what a hero he was. You were on that mission too, but you had never been particularly interested in recognition. It was one of the few things you and Leon agreed on, even if the reasons behind it weren't always the same.

You'd been in the field long before the Division ever put you beside him. Years of military training had taught you how to keep your head up when everything around you was falling apart, and your time working in intelligence had made you good at the parts of an operation that never made it into the reports. You hadn't counted your sleepless nights, the nightmares, or the fact that you’d essentially traded a normal life away years ago. You’d been living in places nobody would ever imagine—training alongside South American forces, sometimes even sleeping on hard-wood floors simply because you couldn’t catch a break. That’s what shaped you. And some even called you ‘Little Hawk’. You weren't the kind of agent who needed someone watching your back every second. If anything, you'd spent most of your career being the person other agents were told to keep up with.

That was why special operations had eventually paired you with Leon. Not because you needed him, but because the two of you worked. Two relentless, broken agents who cared more about the mission than their own lives.

You could read a room before he had finished looking at it. He could improvise when your carefully laid-out plan inevitably caught fire. Somewhere along the way, the distinction between his instincts and your instincts had become almost irrelevant. You moved together without having to say a word.

And despite all of that, you had never considered yourself indispensable. There were others, even thousands of people training and making themselves useful to the force and the country. You were just in a good position.

Leon was different. His name carried weight far beyond the agency's walls. His record had become the kind of thing people talked about in rooms you would never be invited into. When something went wrong involving biological weapons, governments didn't ask who was available—they asked for him. And now, after saving the President’s daughter, that record was pure gold.

And you? You’d keep doing what you do best: saving as many people as you can. That was what really mattered to you.

So when high command decided to make him the centerpiece of the evening, you hadn't been offended when your name was left off the program. You’d actually preferred it that way. Which was why you couldn't understand why Leon seemed to have a problem with it. After all, the job was done.

You knew Leon well enough to know he hated every second of this party. He knew exactly how quickly people forget the cost behind the results; they were just there for the outcome. He knew half the people in the room didn't actually care about what it took to bring Ashley home safe. They just saw the heroic headline.

Still, seeing him outside of combat was always a strange adjustment. Sure, you’d shared crappy motel rooms, bled through improvised bandages on threadbare mattresses, and split cold rations in the back of unmarked trucks. But tuxedo Leon? That was a dangerous new chapter.

People knew Leon S. Kennedy as the myth. The top-tier operative who walked into biological nightmares, cleared the LZ, and waited quietly for his next deployment. You knew him as the guy who complained endlessly about terrible office coffee at six in the morning, the silent judge of everyone's music choices, and an insufferable bastard who would argue a point to the death just to pretend he’d won—even when he clearly hadn't.

The ballroom felt suffocatingly quiet. Too many suits, too many polished smiles, too many high-ranking officials who only saw agents as casualty percentages on an operational report.

You spotted him near the far end of the long mahogany bar, isolated from the circle of politicians trying to get a piece of him. He was wearing a black suit, no tie, the top buttons of his white shirt undone. His hair was styled in a lazy slick-back, though a few stubborn strands had already fallen forward across his forehead. He looked completely out of place among the pristine military uniforms—and infuriatingly attractive because of it.

You approached just as an older government official finished clapping Leon on the shoulder and walked away. Leon didn't even watch him leave; his eyes were already on you as you stepped up to the bar. His gaze lingered for a second longer than necessary, tracking the dark gown, before returning to your face.

You didn't miss it. Of course you didn't.

"Let me guess," you murmured, leaning your forearm against the polished wood, stepping right into his personal space. "He spent ten minutes explaining to you how the President sleeps soundly because of your service."

Leon didn't look away. He took a slow, deliberate sip from his champagne glass, his thumb tracing the rim of the crystal before he set it down with a quiet clink.

"Fifteen," he corrected smoothly, his voice a low, gravelly rasp over the jazz music filling the room. "And he called me 'son' twice. I almost poured this over his shoes."

A faint, dry chuckle escaped you. "Tragic. I suppose he didn't ask about the rest of the operation?"

"He didn't even know there was an operation beyond the headlines," Leon replied, turning his shoulders slightly toward you, his coat brushing against yours as he closed off the rest of the room. His blue eyes narrowed just enough to catch the faint humor in yours. "I told him my partner handled half the body count in the castle. He thought I was being modest."

"Well, naturally," you said, swirling the champagne in your glass. "A woman covering your back while you fought off giant bugs in the catacombs doesn't fit their poster-boy narrative."

Leon let out a quiet breath through his nose—that dry, barely-there exhale he used instead of a laugh. "Those invisible bastards were your idea of fun, as I recall."

"I recall saving your ass when you almost got pinned by a Novistador," you countered smoothly. "And if memory serves, I was the one who found the dynamite to clear the rocks in those mines."

"You almost blew us both up."

"It was controlled demolition, Kennedy. Big difference."

"Right. Controlled," Leon deadpanned, taking another sip. "Tell that to my ears. They were ringing for two days."

"You survived."

"Barely."

A quiet, familiar pause settled between you. It was the kind of silence that only came from months of surviving together in places nobody upstairs would ever understand. The village, the chainsaw-wielding fanatics, the iron gates of the island, Krauser... you had been through the same meat grinder.

Leon leaned back slightly against the bar, resting his elbow on the counter. His gaze drifted over the crowd before settling back on you, his expression hardening just a fraction into something more grounded.

"They had your name on the original briefing draft for tonight," he said casually, though his tone carried that low, sharp edge he used when something annoyed him. "I saw the paperwork on the Director's desk before the gala."

You took a slow sip of your drink. "I asked them to scratch it."

Leon’s brow twitched. "Why?"

"Because I don't need a room full of suits clapping for me to know I did my job," you replied, keeping your tone light, though the reality behind it was cold. "In their eyes, I'm an operational line in a classified report. If I don't come back from the next drop, they fill my desk by Monday. You're the face of the rescue. They need you on that stage."

Leon stared at you for a long moment. He didn't offer a dramatic speech. He didn't try to play the hero. He just set his glass down on the wood with a dull, heavy thud, turning his body completely toward you.

"That's bullshit," he said flatly.

You raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"

"You're talking like an analyst who never left Washington," Leon said, his voice low, dry, and sharp. "You were in the mud. You took the heavy fire at the island's dock so I could breach the main facility. You didn't wait for backup when we got separated in the lab, and you didn't ask for a pat on the back when we pulled the President's daughter onto that jet ski."

You looked down at your glass, the humor fading into a quiet, heavy reality. "Leon..."

"I don't give a damn about this party, the speeches, or whatever optics they're trying to sell tonight," he continued, holding your gaze with that steady, deadpan intensity. "But you earned your place in that report. Leaving you out wasn't modesty on your part. It was just stupid on theirs."

It was classic Leon: blunt, slightly bitter, but carrying a weight of loyalty that didn't need grand words to be felt.

You swallowed quietly, a small, reluctant smile pulling at the corner of your mouth. "You really hate political parties, don't you?"

"I hate listening to people who weren't there tell me how it went," he muttered, picking his glass back up. "And I hate hearing you sound like you're replaceable."

The admission hung between you, quiet and unpolished, amidst the chatter and string music of the ballroom. You held his gaze, feeling the grounded, unshakable presence he always brought when things went to hell.

"Fine," you whispered, tilting your glass toward him. "Next time we rescue a VIP, I'll make sure they put my name in bold."

Leon’s mouth curved into a faint, rare smirk, his blue eyes softening just a fraction as he tapped his glass against yours.

"I'll hold you to that, Little Hawk."

You froze mid-sip, your glass halting halfway to your lips. You blinked, staring at him as the old tactical callsign echoed between you, cutting through the low noise of the ballroom.

"Where did you even pull that from?" you asked, leaning in slightly, your eyes narrowing in genuine disbelief. "That callsign was redacted from my active file before I was even transferred to the US."

Leon took a slow, unhurried sip of his drink, looking entirely pleased with himself, though he kept his expression perfectly deadpan.

"I have my sources," he said smoothly, leaning back against the bar. "Turns out if you dig deep enough into the joint-task force archives, people write interesting things in the margins. Especially about your time doing dark-ops in the middle of Buenos Aires."

“Sources as in ‘I sneak into the government archives’?”

"I like knowing who's watching my back before I drop into a warzone," Leon replied, his tone nonchalant, though the sharp, attentive glint in his eyes gave him away.

The quiet space between you was abruptly shattered by the sharp sound of feedback echoing through the ballroom’s surrounding speaker system.

Near the far end of the hall, standing beside a podium flanked by two pristine American flags, a high-ranking Division director in a heavily decorated dress uniform tapped the microphone twice. His voice, boisterous and practiced, cut straight through the low hum of jazz and political chatter.

"If I could have everyone's attention for a moment, please..."

Leon didn't roll his eyes, but the subtle, exhausted shift in his shoulders said everything his face refused to show. He took one last, slow sip of his champagne, letting the cold liquid settle before placing the empty crystal glass on the dark mahogany counter with a dull, final click.

Before he could even process the director calling his name, a young aide in a crisp suit approached him from the side, leaning in to whisper respectfully.

"Agent Kennedy, the Director is expecting you at the podium for the commendation. We need you on stage now, sir."

Leon didn't answer immediately. He just stared at the aide for a beat, his expression a wall of pure, unbothered detachment, before letting out a quiet, resigned breath through his nose. He reached down to pull his dark suit jacket straight, adjusting his cuffs with practiced efficiency.

"Duty calls," he muttered, turning back toward you. He looked entirely unenthusiastic about the prospect of walking toward those bright lights, but as he stepped away from the bar, his eyes flicked to yours, steady and quiet.

You stayed leaning against the bar, resting one elbow on the polished wood. Across the floor, Leon cut through the sea of tailored tuxedos and glittering evening gowns with a silent, measured stride. Even out of his gear, dressed in a black suit with his shirt collar left slightly unbuttoned, there was an edge to how he moved—a constant, ingrained awareness of his surroundings that no formal event could ever truly wash away. Under the warm glow of the crystal chandeliers, standing beside government officials who had never heard a shot fired in anger, he looked completely out of place.

And, as much as you hated to admit it, infuriatingly striking.

The Director began reading from a pre-approved, highly polished speech printed on stiff official cardstock. His voice boomed through the speakers, dripping with theatrical patriotism and loaded with political buzzwords: unyielding heroism, unwavering devotion to the nation, decisive solo action in the face of an unprecedented biological threats. You knew those words by heart. Too many political speeches you were there to witness and follow if there were any instructions. That’s how your life works now.

It was the exact narrative Washington had spent the last month crafting, they made it look clean. Isolated. A single, flawless operative marching into a remote hellhole and bringing the President's daughter back on his own. It made for great headlines, satisfied the oversight committees, and swept the messy, chaotic reality of field work entirely under the rug. And honestly, sounded great for the relief of the rest of the world’s bureaucracy.

You listened from the bar with a quiet, bitter amusement. You had asked to be left off the program—you truly had—because you hated the optics, the hypocrisy, and the fake smiles of people who didn't care about the bodies left behind in that village, all the lives that were taken for Las Plagas, people with families, feelings, and maybe even plans for the future. But standing there, listening to them attribute every tactical breach, every perimeter hold, and every near-death firefight solely to a single man... a small, quiet part of you still felt the cold sting of being erased. You didn't want the spotlight, but being rendered completely invisible by design was a different kind of pill to swallow. But you wanted it that way.

“Please, welcome Agent Leon S. Kennedy, the man that made this happen.”

The invitation of the director made Leon approach the stage while the sound of restless applause echoed through all the ballroom. He adjusted the microphone with a quiet breath that carried clearly over the room. Then, the entire ballroom fell silent, waiting for the agency's golden boy to deliver his victory speech, talk about the defiances he had to go through and maybe how this mission was a before and after in today’s modern world. But Leon won’t do that, and never will.

Leon stood just half a step behind the lectern, his hands resting loosely on the cue cards the oficcials were expecting him to read from. If you knew Leon for a day or two, you’d know he clearly does not respect protocol—Well, most times—but today was not the exception. As his gaze vaguely read the prompt of the speech they previously arranged for him. He recognized it was pure bullshit. His face was a completely impassive mask—polite, distant, and patient enough to endure the speech.

"Thank you, Director," Leon began, his voice low, gravelly, and flat. "It's an honor to be here tonight. But operational reports tend to simplify things for the press or the whole system. Who knows?”

A subtle, uneasy rustle rippled through the front row of officials.

Leon’s blue eyes scanned the grand room, ignoring the cameras flicking at him, until his eyes locked directly onto yours at the far edge of the bar. Observing your relaxed posture while you listened.

"The truth is, nobody survives an operation like Spain alone," Leon said, his tone dry, steady, and unyielding. If professionalism was a person. "They tell you I pulled off a solo retrieval. No help. No one I relied on while some B.O.W tried to reach for my limbs. But I’m eager to say I had an operative holding my perimeter. Someone who gave comfort to the target while I was fighting for their safety. Someone that held off heavy fire at the docks when everything went to hell, and possesses a field record so spotless that half the senior directors in this room have personally requested her as backup on high-risk drops.”

Fucking hell, Leon.

You should’ve see it coming. Of course Leon wouldn’t leave it alone. I mean he was not wrong. Once you were transferred to the US, all analysts and field agents were talking about the military woman who was living in South America, the one who was trained into almost the dephts of hell. More than once they pulled you off at 3 a.m to backup Senior agents. Changed into tactical gears in less than 10 minutes.

A ripple of low whispers broke out among the crowd. Heads began turning toward the back of the room. At you, clearly. People in high command knew exactly who he was describing—the reputation of the unit's sharpest operative wasn't a secret, even if her name was usually redacted from public files.

Leon maintained eye contact with you, a faint, stubborn glint in his eyes.

"She asked to be left off the official program tonight," Leon continued, a dry edge to his voice. "Because she prefers doing the work over taking the credit. But I don't run successful extractions alone. I guess you all know who I'm talking about.” He didn't just point or offer a polite toast. He held out his hand toward the back corner of the room, looking straight at you. "Step up here for a second."

What could you possibly do? Not go? You shook your head, almost amused. Dozens of eyes—generals, analysts, intelligence chiefs, past superiors—were now fully fixed on you. Leaving him hanging on stage would create an even bigger scene than the one he had just started, so you took a slow, steadying breath, set your glass down on the mahogany counter, and smoothed the front of your black dress and tried to accomodate in little movements your hair. Everything felt heavy for a moment.

But you walked toward the stage with the calm, measured stride of someone who had faced down armed hostiles in dark alleys. You didn't look nervous; your operational mask was flawless. Your mouth making a little professional smile while you were approaching the stage.

As you reached the podium, Leon stepped back just an inch, making space for you at the microphone. His expression didn't show much, but as your shoulders brushed, you caught the faint, subtle smirk at the corner of his mouth.

You gave him the typical gaze he recognized by heart . The ‘You’re An Idiot’ look. A brief, sharp side-eye before turning to face the room full of Washington's most powerful figures.

You leaned in slightly toward the microphone, your voice coming through clear, level, and precise—the same tone you used to deliver a sitrep, not a toast.

"Agent Kennedy tends to overstate things when someone puts him in a suit," you said, and the line landed exactly where you wanted it, drawing a light ripple of laughter from the crowd. You let it settle before continuing, your posture unchanged, your hands loose at your sides instead of gripping the podium the way most people did up here. "What he described was standard perimeter work. Hold the line, clear the approach, keep the target breathing until extraction. That's the job. It doesn't usually come with a stage."

You paused, and in that pause you did something none of the previous speakers had bothered to do—you actually looked at the room. Not the cameras, not the Director, not the front row. You scanned it the way you'd scan a room with three exits and only one of them clean, and half the generals watching knew exactly what that look was, because they'd seen agents do it before a breach.

"I'll say this much, since I'm already up here," you continued, your tone dropping half a register, losing the polite gloss entirely. "Spain wasn't clean. It wasn't solo, and it wasn't the kind of operation that fits in a press release. People made it home because a lot of things went right that nobody's going to write a commendation for. That's not modesty, Director. That's just an accurate report."

A few uncomfortable shifts rippled through the front row—the kind of quiet that told you you'd said something true that the room hadn't asked for. You didn’t soften it.

"I asked to be left off tonight's program because visibility isn't part of what I do, and it isn't something I need." Your eyes flicked, just briefly, to Leon beside you. "Agent Kennedy apparently disagreed. He'll live with that." A faint edge of dry humor, just enough to pull the room back before it tipped too far into discomfort. "Thank you for your time."

You stepped back from the microphone with the same unhurried economy you'd used walking up—no bow, no lingering smile for the cameras, just a short nod to the Director that closed the subject as firmly as a door. Would it bring you trouble? Sure. Did you care? Absolutely not. In fact, they should go ahead and give you a strike, maybe it will come with a suspension —more like a break— of a week.

Leon knew exactly what he was doing when he pulled you up there. He hadn't just wanted you on that stage; he'd wanted this—the unfiltered version, the one who corrected the Director's fairy tale instead of playing along with it. He'd bet on you not softening it, not once, and he'd been right. You could see it in the way he wasn't even trying to hide the satisfaction on his face, like a man who'd called the outcome before the coin even left his hand. Just a player in his game. But honestly, if it made you speak about what you really stand for, then so be it.

You didn't get more than three steps off the stage before the Director intercepted you both, his smile stitched back into place with the kind of effort that made the seams show. Up close, you could see it hadn't quite reached his eyes yet—that would take another minute, maybe two, once he'd decided how to spin what had just happened.

"Agent Kennedy. Agent." He said your designation instead of your name, the way people did when they wanted to remind you which one of you was replaceable on paper. "That was... an unscripted addition to the evening."

"Wasn't planned, no," Leon said flatly, offering nothing else. He wasn't going to make this easier for the man.

The Director's gaze shifted to you, and whatever warmth had been performed for the crowd thinned out considerably. "I appreciate your candor," he said, in the exact tone people used when they didn't. "Though I'd remind you both that tonight's program was approved through proper channels for a reason. There's a version of events the board is comfortable with, and a version that complicates things unnecessarily upstairs."

"With respect, sir," you said, your voice even, professional, giving him nothing to escalate against, "I only said what was already in the after-action report. If it complicates things, that's not something I wrote."

Something flickered behind the Director's eyes—not anger, exactly. More like a man recalculating how much of tonight he'd actually controlled. "We'll discuss the report's classification level tomorrow," he said, tight and clipped, already glancing past you toward the next cluster of officials waiting for his attention. "For now, enjoy the rest of the evening. Both of you."

He didn't wait for a response before turning on his heel, already rebuilding his smile for someone more cooperative.

"That went well," Leon muttered under his breath, watching him go back into the stage and doing the closing toast.

"He's going to make my next four briefings miserable. He’ll send us to the most isolated island on East Japan.”

"Only four?" Leon glanced at you, the corner of his mouth twitching. "Optimistic."

You didn't get the chance to answer him. A tall, older government official with slicked-back black hair and a calculating demeanor stepped directly into your path.

“Quite the unscripted performance, Kennedy,” the official said smoothly, offering a tight, practiced smile. “And a remarkably composed response, Agent. The Director almost had a heart attack when you two took over the microphone.”

The black-haired man turned his sharp gaze toward you, evaluating you with an analytical eye. “Clean execution under heavy fire in the field, from what I read. Though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised given your history with special operations.”

“We were just doing what we do best. Save others for a greater good.” you replied simply, your tone dropping into that cold, clipped language reserved for bureaucrats.

“That you did,” the official noted, stepping half an inch closer and lowering his voice to a dangerous, quiet murmur. “Which is precisely why I needed a moment with both of you before the evening wraps up.” He paused and took a big breath through his mouth. “It’s regarding the recovery from the Spanish site,” the official said, his voice barely carrying over the background string quartet. “Specifically, the specimen secured from the laboratory.”

A subtle shift went through Leon. His jaw tightened ever so slightly. “The Amber sample. We were under the impression it was cleared for containment at the main facility.”

“It was. Until three hours ago,” the official said smoothly, taking a slow sip from his glass of wine. “Certain anomalies were detected in the tissue structure during transit. We had to redirect it here—to the sub-level laboratory beneath this very building—for high-security isolation until the board reviews the research protocol.”

Your internal alarms went off instantly. Moving a high-grade biological hazard to a sub-level vault beneath a civilian-filled gala under the guise of 'anomalies' wasn't just incompetence—it was a setup.

“A high-grade sample in a basement below a party,” you said softly, your tone laced with quiet, dangerous skepticism. “Brilliant logistics, sir.”

The official chuckled dryly, ignoring the bite in your words. “Which is why tonight’s optics were so crucial. The board needs to see the Division's finest standing on that stage, proving everything is under control.” He patted Leon’s shoulder once—a gesture Leon tolerated with minimal movement. “Don't keep the Director waiting for the closing toast, Kennedy.”

As the official melted back into the sea of black ties and evening gowns, a heavy silence settled between you and Leon.

“They don't bring something like that here just to keep it safe,” Leon murmured, his voice dropping into a low register meant only for you as his blue eyes scanned the crowd. “They bring it here because someone wants to sell it.”

“And you were supposed to stand on a stage and smile while they set up the deal,” you replied dryly.

Standing in the dim light away from the chandeliers was a tall woman in a sleek crimson dress. She held a glass of red wine, her posture completely relaxed despite the high-security clearance required to get into that wing. She wasn't looking at the crowd. Her eyes were fixed squarely on you and Leon.

And when she caught you looking, Ada Wong raised her glass in a slow, silent mock-toast, before stepping backward through the curtains and vanishing into the dark terrace.

Ada fucking Wong.

Your pulse didn't spike—years of intelligence work had cured you of panic—but a cold, sharp realization settled in your gut.

Leon noticed the sudden stillness in your posture immediately. He didn't ask if you were okay. He just followed your gaze toward the empty curtains, his expression darkening into something far more dangerous than the annoyance he’d shown the official.

“For fuck’s sake.”

“What?” he asked flatly.

“The sample isn't going to stay in that basement for very long,” you said, your tone dropping into pure operational focus as you straightened up, the black dress suddenly feeling like armor. “Your ex-girlfriend just walked onto the balcony.”

"I'll go," you said, already turning toward the terrace doors before Leon could argue.

"No." The word came out fast, sharper than he probably meant it. "I'll handle Ada. You take the sub-level, make sure nobody's touched that sample."

"Because that makes more sense," you said, arching a brow. "You want to go have a heart-to-heart with your ex while I do inventory in a basement."

"It's not a heart-to-heart, it's damage control." Leon's jaw was tight, his eyes still fixed on the curtains where she'd disappeared. "I know how she thinks. I can get her talking."

"You always know how she thinks." The words left you before you could file down the edge on them. "Funny how that worked out so well for us in Spain too."

Leon's gaze snapped back to you. "That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" You crossed your arms, and for a second the ballroom noise around you both seemed to drop away entirely. "She shows up, you go quiet, and somehow the mission always ends up running through her instead of around her. Krauser had a knife to my throat in that cabin, and you were still asking her whose side she was on."

"Because her answer mattered." Leon's voice dropped, low and clipped. "If she'd said Wesker, we'd have known exactly how bad our night was about to get. That's not sentiment, that's intel."

"Sure. Intel." You let out a short, humorless laugh. "Is that what you call it when she hands you a rocket launcher and disappears into a lake, and you spend the next ten minutes staring at the water like she's going to surface and explain herself?"

"I wasn't staring at the water."

"You absolutely were staring at the water, Leon."

His jaw ticked. "You had a spider the size of a truck trying to eat you at the time. Forgive me for not clocking exactly how long I looked at a lake."

"I handled the spider just fine." Your voice had gone flatter, colder—the tone you used when you were angrier than you wanted to admit. "I always handle it fine. That's not the point."

"Then what is the point?" Leon stepped in closer, dropping his voice as a passing couple glanced their way. "Because it sounds like you're accusing me of something, and I'd like to know what, exactly.”

"Say it," Leon pressed, closing the last bit of distance between you, his voice low enough that it stayed between the two of you and nobody else. "Whatever it is you're not saying right now, just say it."

"Leon—"

"No, I mean it." His eyes didn't waver from yours, and for once there was nothing deadpan or dry in his tone—just something raw and a little frustrated, like he'd been waiting for this conversation to happen for longer than tonight. "You don't dance around things. That's not you. So don't start now.”

The music kept playing behind you, absurdly soft and pretty for a conversation that felt like it was cracking something open that had been sealed shut for a long time. You could feel your own pulse in your throat, which almost never happened to you anymore—not in firefights, not in extractions gone wrong, not even the night Krauser had a blade an inch from your carotid. But here, under gold light and violin strings, staring at Leon Kennedy waiting for you to finally say the thing out loud, your hands felt unsteady in a way you didn't have a tactical response for.

You almost laughed, except it wouldn't have been the kind that meant anything good. "You want me to say it here? In the middle of a gala, two minutes after finding out someone's trying to sell a bioweapon out of the basement?"

"I want you to say it before you walk away and pretend this conversation didn't happen." Leon's voice had dropped even lower, and there was something almost pleading buried underneath the sharpness of it, something he probably hated that you could hear. "You've been carrying this around for months. I'm not blind, I just figured you'd tell me when you were ready. So—be ready. Now's apparently the time."

You hesitated for half a second too long, and that alone told you how close you were to saying something you couldn't walk back in the middle of a ballroom. So you didn’t tell him the real reason. He could wait, or maybe if God’s on your side never hear it. “Leon, the point here is you don't send someone else in to deal with her. Not the Director, not command, not me. It's always you. And now she's here, at your gala, two floors above a sample that's apparently for sale, and your first instinct is still to go talk to her yourself instead of letting security handle a known hostile."

"She's not just a hostile to me, and you know that." The words came out low, almost tired, like he'd had this exact argument with himself plenty of times before you ever said a word of it out loud. "She's saved my life more than once. She's also sold us out more than once. I don't get the luxury of a clean answer on her, and I'm not going to pretend I do just because it'd make this conversation easier.”

Of course she is not just a hostile to him. How could I forget that she’s saved him many, countless times. Also, I can not recall how many times she disappeared on him, making him believe she was actually dead and come back like she was a resurecting deity. Sure…

"I'm not asking for a clean answer. I'm asking why it's never anyone else's job to find out what she's doing here."

"Because if it goes sideways, I'd rather it be me standing in front of her than you." Leon said it fast, like it had gotten away from him before he could soften it, and for a second neither of you said anything at all.

The jazz kept playing. Somewhere behind you, glasses clinked and someone laughed too loudly at a joke you weren't listening to. You stared at him, and he stared back, and the whole thing sat there, ugly and half-true and impossible to take back now that it was out in the open air between you.

"Right," you said finally, quieter now, all the heat draining out of your voice into something that scared you more. "Because God forbid it's me."

"That's not what I—"

"Forget it." You shook your head, and you could feel the small, cold voice surfacing in the back of your skull, the one that had kept you breathing through worse rooms than this one. You're coworkers. This is a job. This is not the time. Whatever this was—whatever it had just started to become in the last thirty seconds—it wasn't going to get solved in a hallway with a live biological sample two floors down and a woman in red currently walking away with whatever she'd come here for.

You exhaled, long and slow, and when you spoke again your voice had leveled itself back into something professional, flat, controlled—the voice you used to survive briefings you hated. "I'm going after her. You check the sub-level. That's the smarter split, and you know it. You know her. I don't have history clouding my read on this."

Leon looked like he wanted to argue that too, but he didn't. Maybe because he knew you were right. Maybe because some part of him didn't want to watch you walk toward Ada Wong either way, and staying quiet was the only version of that thought he was willing to let out into the open.

"Be careful," he said instead, quieter now, all the earlier edge gone out of his voice.

"Always am."

You didn't wait for anything else. You turned on your heel, the black dress moving like water around your legs, and made for the terrace doors Ada had vanished through minutes ago—leaving Leon standing there with a version of the conversation neither of you had actually finished.

The terrace was empty by the time you reached it, the cold night air a sharp contrast to the perfume and heat of the ballroom. Curtains still swayed faintly from where Ada had passed through them minutes ago. You didn't call out her name—that would've been amateur, and you were many things, but never that.

Instead, you scanned the terrace the way you'd scan any room with more than one way out. Stone railing, a drop to the gardens below that a normal person wouldn't consider, and to your left, a narrow service stairwell half-hidden behind an ornamental hedge. Ada wouldn't have taken the obvious exit. She never did.

You went for the stairwell.

Three flights down, moving light on your feet despite the heels you'd cursed all night, you caught the faint echo of footsteps just ahead—unhurried, deliberate, the kind of pace that told you she knew exactly how far behind her you were and wasn't worried about it.

"You're persistent. I'll give you that." Ada's voice drifted up from the landing below, amused, unbothered, like she was commenting on the weather rather than being tracked through a service stairwell. "Though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Spain taught me that much about you already."

"Then you already know I'm not going to lose you on some stairs." You reached the landing, and there she was—leaning against the wall beside a service door, arms loosely crossed, red dress catching the dim emergency lighting like a wound. She looked entirely too comfortable for someone supposedly running from anyone.

"Mm. No, I don't imagine you would." Ada tilted her head, studying you with that same evaluating calm she'd worn in that ruined Spanish village a month ago, when she'd sized you up over Leon's shoulder like you were a variable she hadn't accounted for yet. "You handled yourself well back there, by the way. The speech." Her mouth curved, slow. "Very composed for someone who apparently didn't want to be up there at all."

You kept your face flat, professional, refusing to give her the reaction she was fishing for. "You were watching."

"I'm always watching." Ada pushed off the wall, unhurried, circling half a step to your left—testing you, seeing if you'd flinch, reposition, give something away. You didn't move. "It was almost sweet, honestly. Leon, dragging you up there like a trophy after you specifically asked not to be. He does that—decides what's good for people without asking them first." A small, private smile. "I'd know."

She tilted her head, studying you with something almost fond, almost cruel. "You know, it must be exhausting," she went on, ignoring whatever guard you'd just put up, "being the one who does all the unglamorous work while he gets the stage, the medals, the little speeches. And you just—" she gestured vaguely, almost lazily, "—stand there and let it happen. Loyal little soldier."

"I don't need the stage." Your voice came out even, controlled, though something in your chest had gone tight and hot.

"Everyone says that right up until someone else takes it." Ada's smile sharpened, just slightly, and you felt the barb land exactly where she wanted it to. "He looked good up there tonight, didn't he? Golden boy in a suit. Must be nice, being so close to something everyone else wants."

"I'm close to him because we work together." The words came out clipped, faster than you meant them to.

"Mm." Ada's gaze dragged over you slowly, unreadable, amused in a way that made something ugly coil low in your stomach. "That's the trouble with Leon. People meet the version of him that already made it out the other side. The one they put on stages, in reports, in whatever headline Washington's selling this month." She circled another half step, unhurried, clearly enjoying herself. "I met him back when none of that existed yet. When he was still green enough to flinch at his own gunfire, when Raccoon City finished carving him into whatever he is now." A pause, deliberate, cruel in its calm. "You got the version that already survived.”

Something hot and immediate flared behind your ribs—not surprise, not hurt, just the old, familiar loathing you'd carried for this woman since the day you'd first watched her walk into a room like she owned the air in it. You wanted, badly, to say something that would finally wipe that composed little smile off her face. You didn't. You'd promised yourself a long time ago you wouldn't be the one to hand Ada Wong a reaction she could enjoy. You sourly swallowed all the words that were begging to come out.

"I'm not here to talk about Leon." You tilted your head as the words came out flat, controlled, though it cost you more than you wanted to admit to keep them that way.

"No?" Ada's smile widened, just slightly. "You followed me down three flights of stairs in heels instead of letting him handle this himself. That's not exactly a woman who isn't thinking about Leon.”

Fuck, now you know where Leon learned that ability to mind read. You hated it because she was actually right.

"I'm thinking about a sample that isn't supposed to be sitting in a basement under a room full of civilians," you said evenly, refusing to let the redirect land twice. "You know who's moving it. I want a name."

Ada studied you for a long moment, head tilted, clearly recalibrating. Whatever she'd expected from this conversation, it apparently wasn't you cutting straight past the bait. "You're no fun," she said lightly, though something behind her eyes had sharpened, gone more careful. "In Spain you at least let Leon do the talking while you covered the angles. Now you're doing both."

"Things change."

"Do they." It wasn't really a question. Ada considered you for another beat, weighing something you couldn't read, before she finally spoke again—slower this time, more deliberate, each word placed like she was deciding in real time how much she was willing to spend. "I don't hand out names for free. You know that. I didn't survive this long doing favors for men in suits, and I'm certainly not about to start doing them for his partner."

"I'm not asking for a favor. I'm asking because whatever's happening with that sample isn't going to stay contained to a basement, and you know that too, or you wouldn't still be standing here talking instead of already gone."

Something flickered across Ada's face—not quite surprise, but close, like she hadn't expected you to read that correctly. For the first time all night, the performance in her expression thinned, just slightly, into something more calculating than playful. "You're sharper than the last three they sent," she said, almost to herself. "Fine. One piece. Not the name—you haven't earned that yet." She tilted her head toward the door behind her. "That 'anomaly' in the tissue reading wasn't a lab error. Someone manufactured it to justify moving the sample somewhere with fewer eyes on it. And it wasn't anyone from outside your agency who authorized that."

Your pulse didn't spike, but something cold settled low in your chest. "You're saying this is internal."

"I'm saying you should be asking who signed off on tonight's relocation before you ask who's buying." Ada was already backing toward the service door, her tone flattening back into something unreadable. "That's more than I usually give away on a staircase. Don't waste it."

"Ada—"

"Tell Leon I said he looked good up there," she said instead, pulling the door open, throwing one last glance over her shoulder, something unreadable behind the usual performance. "And tell him I noticed he didn't listen to you. Some things about him really don't change. Thank you for your visit, Little Hawk.”

For God’s sake how many peole have read your fucking report. Again like reassuring your point, she got that skill to make you the one that did not belong in the space. Coming here and adressing me as my alias? You could feel your blood boil.

And then she was gone, the door swinging shut behind her with a soft, final click, leaving you alone in the stairwell with half an answer and a headache that had nothing to do with the champagne. You took a deep sigh. The night's just starting. Fuck the off-duty night.

You stood there longer than you should have, one hand braced against the cold concrete wall, listening to your own pulse finally start to settle back into something normal. The stairwell smelled like dust and old paint, nothing like the ballroom above, and for a second you let yourself just breathe in it, grateful for a space that didn't require you to perform anything for anyone.

Must be nice, being so close to something everyone else wants.

You hated that the words were still sitting there, lodged somewhere under your ribs, refusing to dissolve the way every other insult you'd absorbed over the years usually did within minutes. You'd been called worse by actual hostiles holding actual weapons. You'd been spat on by a man twice your size who thought a woman had no business clearing a room, and it had rolled off you in about the time it took to put him on the ground. Ada hadn't even raised her voice. She hadn't needed to. She'd just found the one loose thread in you and given it the gentlest possible tug, and somehow that had done more damage than half the men who'd ever pointed a gun at your head.

Golden boy in a suit. You thought about the way Leon had looked up on that stage—unbothered, deadpan, giving away information nobody had cleared him to give, just because he'd decided you deserved it. Noble, in his own stubborn, infuriating way. And yet at the end of the night, it would still be his name in the official record. His face on whatever internal newsletter circulated next month, his commendation framed on some wall in some office you'd never be invited into. You, at best, a line item—Agent, redacted, commendable conduct. You'd told yourself for years that this was fine. Preferable, even. You'd chosen the version of this career that didn't come with a spotlight, because the spotlight got people killed, got their faces printed in places their enemies could find them, got them turned into symbols instead of soldiers. So why did it suddenly feel like something you needed defended?

You pressed the heel of your hand briefly against your sternum, annoyed at yourself for needing to. This wasn't like you. You didn't spiral over social politics, didn't waste bandwidth on optics or public perception—you'd built your entire career on not caring about any of that, on being the person who did the work in the dark so someone else could stand in the light and make it mean something to the people who needed a hero to believe in. That had never bothered you before Ada Wong had made it sound like a consolation prize.

Because it's not about the credit, a small, unhelpful voice offered from somewhere far too honest to ignore. It never was.

You tried to think it through the way you'd think through any tactical problem—clinically, at a distance, like you were debriefing someone else's mess instead of your own. Fact: you didn't actually want the stage. That part was true, had always been true, long before Leon existed in your life at all. Fact: Ada's comment shouldn't have landed anywhere, because you didn't respect her enough to let her opinion carry weight. So why did it? You turned the question over twice and didn't like either answer that surfaced. Either you cared what Ada Wong thought of you, which felt insulting on its face. Or you cared what it meant that she got to define parts of Leon you'd never had access to—the before, the vulnerable, the version that existed prior to all the medals and headlines—and that had nothing to do with credit at all.

You didn't like that answer better. If anything, you liked it less, because it meant the ugly little knot sitting in your chest wasn't about fairness or recognition or optics. It was about him. Which was absurd, because Leon Kennedy was your partner. A colleague. Someone you'd bled next to more times than you'd like to count, whose bad jokes you tolerated at six in the morning over terrible coffee, whose back you covered because that was the job, not because of anything softer underneath it. You were a highly trained intelligence operative with a body count and a security clearance that outranked half the people at that gala. You did not get tangled up over a man just because his ex-something-or-other knew how to needle you in three sentences flat.

And yet here you were, standing in a stairwell that smelled like dust, arguing with yourself about feelings you refused to name, while a live biological weapon sat two floors below you waiting to be sold to the highest bidder.

Get it together.

There was a sample to secure. A partner walking into a room that might not be cleared. A woman in red who'd just confirmed the threat was internal, which meant somebody you might pass in a hallway tomorrow had already sold you both out once tonight. That was the job. That was the only thing that mattered right now, and you'd figure out what to do with the rest of it later—if there even was a "rest of it" worth figuring out.

The service stairwell dropped you into a corridor that smelled like bleach and cold concrete, a world away from the perfume and jazz two floors up. Emergency lighting cast everything in a dull amber wash, humming faintly overhead, and somewhere ahead you could hear the low drone of industrial refrigeration units—containment equipment, probably, working overtime to keep something cold that had no business being this close to a room full of civilians. You kicked off the heels within the first ten steps, tucking them under one arm without slowing down. Some habits didn't care what you were wearing.

You found Leon crouched near a service junction, jacket already gone, sleeves rolled to the elbow, his tie discarded somewhere you doubted he'd bother retrieving later. He had a security panel cracked open, wires pulled loose, his brow furrowed in concentration, the picture of a man who'd clearly done this exact thing in far worse lighting before.

"Tell me you got something useful," he said without looking up, clearly having heard you coming from twenty feet away. Old habits, both of you.

"Ada says it's internal. Someone in the agency manufactured the anomaly reading to justify moving the sample down here." You crouched beside him, scanning the corridor on instinct—two exits, one camera with its wire already cut, and that told you everything you needed to know about how long you actually had before whoever was running this operation noticed their surveillance had gone dark. "She wouldn't give me a name. Said I hadn't earned it yet."

"Charming as always." Leon's jaw tightened as he pulled the last wire free, and the panel's little red light blinked out entirely, plunging that section of the wall into darker shadow. "Well, whoever it is already beat us here. This whole floor's supposed to have three-tier authorization on every door. I count zero locks actually engaged. Somebody walked through here with clearance nobody should have questioned."

"So someone's already inside the vault."

"Someone's already inside the vault," he confirmed, straightening to his full height, his hand finding the sidearm holstered discreetly beneath his jacket—the one nobody at the gala had clocked because Leon Kennedy never went anywhere without one, tuxedo or not. Some habits ran deeper than dress code. "You armed?"

You reached down along the slit of your dress, into the small tactical holster strapped to your thigh that had been chafing all night under the silk, and pulled the compact pistol free with a familiar, grounding weight in your palm. "Always am."

Leon's eyes flicked to the weapon, then back to your face, something between approval and exasperation flickering across his expression. "You brought a gun to a gala."

"You're welcome."

"I didn't say thank you."

"You were about to."

The corner of his mouth twitched—the closest thing to a real smile he'd give you tonight, gone as fast as it appeared, swallowed back into the flat, focused calm you both wore like armor whenever a job actually started to matter. Whatever had been simmering between you an hour ago in the ballroom seemed to fold itself neatly away, tucked behind the same door you both knew how to shut when the situation demanded it. This was the version of the two of you that never needed translating.

He nodded toward the end of the corridor, where a heavy steel door sat cracked open just enough to leak pale light into the hallway. "Vault's that way. Fall in?"

"Like old times."

You moved together the way you always had—no wasted words, no need for hand signals when you'd spent months reading each other's shoulders instead of speaking. Leon took point at the door, easing it open another inch, testing the hinge for creak before committing his weight to it, and you slid in behind him low, weapon raised, eyes already sweeping the room before your brain had fully processed what you were looking at.

The sub-level lab was smaller than you expected—stainless steel tables, a bank of refrigerated containment units along the far wall, one of them standing open, its seal broken, cold vapor still curling off the exposed shelf like something exhaling. Two men in dark tactical gear were crouched beside it, one of them already sliding a sealed case into a reinforced backpack, the other keeping watch on the second door with a rifle held low and ready.

Leon didn't hesitate. "Federal agents! Hands where I can—"

The nearer merc spun with a pistol already rising, and the room went loud all at once, the crack of gunfire swallowing whatever else Leon had been about to say.

You dropped low on instinct, the first shot cracking past where your head had been a half-second earlier, close enough that you felt the displaced air against your cheek, and returned fire in a tight, controlled burst that put the man down before he got a second shot off. Years of training had a way of narrowing the world down to exactly what mattered in moments like this—breath, sightline, trigger—and everything else, the dress, the heels discarded somewhere behind you, the ringing echo of a gala two floors up, simply ceased to exist.

Leon was already moving right, using a steel table for cover, drawing the second merc's attention as he tried to angle for a clean shot at you from behind the open containment unit.

"Left side!" Leon called, voice sharp and clipped over the gunfire, and you were already moving before the words finished leaving his mouth—rolling behind the nearest table, popping up at an angle he couldn't have taken himself, and putting two rounds into the second merc's shoulder hard enough to spin him off balance. He staggered, rifle swinging wide, and Leon closed the distance in three fast strides, driving a clean strike into the man's jaw that put him down for good, the rifle clattering uselessly across the tile.

Your ears rang faintly in the sudden quiet, the acrid smell of gunpowder sharp against the sterile lab air. Somewhere above you, you were almost certain nobody upstairs had even registered the muffled shots through two floors of concrete and jazz music. Small mercies. You rose slowly from cover, weapon still up, doing a slow visual sweep of the room out of pure muscle memory before your body allowed itself to fully relax.

"You good?" Leon asked, already crossing to check the case the merc had been sliding into the backpack, his own breathing only slightly elevated, adrenaline visible in the tight set of his shoulders rather than anything as obvious as panic.

"Fine." You kept your weapon up a moment longer, sweeping the room a second time out of habit, checking the corners, the vents, the second door at the far end you hadn't cleared yet. "That's not all of them."

"No," Leon agreed grimly, crouching to examine the case—still sealed, the sample intact inside its reinforced housing, a small mercy in a night that hadn't offered many. "Two guys don't move a biohazard sample alone. There's a third somewhere, probably running comms, maybe already gone the second the shooting started."

"Or waiting to see if the first two actually pulled it off before they show their face." You nodded toward the second door, already recalculating the room's exits, the angles, the places a third man could be watching from without exposing himself. "I'll clear that hallway."

"Together."

"Leon—"

"Together," he said again, more firmly this time, already moving to flank the door instead of arguing about it further, his tone leaving no real room for negotiation. "We're not doing the whole splitting-up thing twice in one night. Look how well that worked out with Ada."

You didn't have a good comeback for that, mostly because he wasn't wrong, so you fell into position beside him instead, weapon raised, breath steady, exactly the way you had a hundred times before in a hundred worse places than this one—Spain, the mines, that godforsaken island—each time proving all over again that whatever else the two of you might be tangled up in, this part of you had never needed fixing.

The second door led into a narrow observation corridor, glass-paneled on one side, looking down into what had probably once been a secondary research bay before someone gutted it for storage. Leon eased forward first, back to the wall, weapon low but ready, and you fell in behind him with the same silent economy you'd used a hundred times before. Voices drifted up ahead—low, controlled, the kind of conversation that wasn't meant to carry past the room it was happening in.

Leon froze first. You felt it before you saw it, the subtle stiffening of his shoulders, and when you leaned just enough to catch the angle through the glass, your own breath caught somewhere in your throat.

The Director stood near a stripped examination table, his ceremonial jacket discarded over a nearby chair, looking twenty years older without the practiced warmth he wore upstairs. Across from him, Ada leaned against the far wall with a glass of wine still somehow in her hand, unbothered, as if she'd simply wandered into another room at the same party instead of a hidden sublevel conversation about biological warfare.

"—already told your associate this was never going to be a simple retrieval," Ada was saying, her tone bored in the specific way that told you she was anything but. "You don't just misplace a sample this contained without someone competent noticing eventually. And clearly," she tipped her glass slightly toward the door you and Leon had just come through, "someone competent already has."

"The retrieval team will handle any interference." The Director's voice had none of its earlier polish. It was flatter now, harder, a man speaking without an audience for the first time all night. "That's not your concern. Your concern is confirming the delivery window still holds."

"My concern," Ada said, straightening slightly, "is being compensated for information I already gave you weeks ago."

"Saddler was very specific about the parameters this time," the Director continued, pacing a slow, restless line along the table. "Kennedy already survived one exposure. His body's immune response is documented, unpredictable, and frankly, useless to us now—we know exactly how that story ends. He's a closed variable."

"Which is why the second target mattered so much in Spain," Ada said, and something in her voice had gone quieter, more deliberate. "Though I recall that attempt didn't go quite as planned."

"No," the Director admitted, a flicker of genuine annoyance crossing his face. "She was exposed to the compound during the extraction, same delivery window as the girl. Should have turned within hours. Instead she metabolized it clean out of her system before symptoms even registered—some anomaly in her physiology nobody flagged beforehand. Saddler considers it unfinished business. He wants confirmation the compound still works on her specifically, not a substitute."

Beside you, Leon went utterly, dangerously still.

Spain. The word landed somewhere deep and cold in your chest. You thought back—the fever that had hit you for exactly one night in that godforsaken village, the one you'd written off as exhaustion, dehydration, too many hours without proper food. You remembered telling Leon you were fine. You remembered him believing you, because you'd believed it yourself.

"She's had months to build whatever resistance carried her through the first exposure," the Director went on. "Saddler wants a second attempt before that window closes entirely. Fresh compound, higher concentration, same profile."

"How reassuring," Ada murmured, "that she gets to be a repeat customer."

"You'd know," the Director said, glancing at her with something close to distaste. "I understand you and Kennedy have history. I'm told his partner isn't fond of that fact."

"History's a generous word for it." Ada's smile didn't reach her eyes this time. "Though I'll admit, she's a far more interesting choice than Ashley ever was. The girl meant nothing to him personally. This one apparently does. Reactions tend to be so much more useful when there's an emotional variable attached."

Your stomach dropped somewhere below the floor you were standing on.

"The delivery method still stands," the Director said, ignoring her tangent entirely. "Modified compound, aerosol-based, easily disguised as a champagne toast or a canapé if we need it subtle. She won't know anything's wrong until she's already symptomatic, and by then, Kennedy will be the one bringing her in—which means the story writes itself. Exhaustion. Field stress. A breakdown nobody in Washington will question, right up until she's fully turned and it's far too late to matter."

"And if I decide the compensation isn't worth being part of this?" Ada asked, tilting her head, and for the first time all night, you heard something in her voice that wasn't performance—something colder, more calculating, weighing an actual decision instead of playing one for an audience.

The Director's expression didn't change, but something in the air did. "Then I suppose Saddler would be very interested to learn exactly how much you already know about his organization's current movements. That kind of knowledge tends to make people either very rich," he said, quiet and precise, "or very short-lived. I'd hate for it to be the latter, given how useful you've been."

Ada's smile didn't waver, but you caught the barest flicker beneath it—something that told you the threat had landed exactly where the Director intended it to. "Careful," she said lightly, setting her wine glass down on the table with a soft, deliberate click. "I don't respond well to being cornered. Ask anyone who's tried."

"I'm not cornering you. I'm reminding you where your interests currently align." The Director checked his watch, and something about the casual, businesslike gesture made the whole conversation feel even colder than the words themselves. "The transfer happens tonight, one way or another. Confirm with your buyer the delivery method's still in place, and you'll get the rest of your payment before the gala closes."

He turned, straightening his shirt, clearly preparing to walk back toward whatever version of himself he needed to be upstairs, and Ada watched him go with an unreadable expression that gave absolutely nothing away.

Beside you, Leon exhaled slowly through his nose, the sound barely audible, and when he turned his head to look at you, his eyes had gone hard in a way you'd only seen a handful of times before—the same look he'd worn walking into that village, into the island, into every room that demanded he stop being careful and start being dangerous.

"They already tried this," he said, voice low and tight, more fury than fear now. "In Spain. That fever you had—that wasn't exhaustion."

"Apparently not."

"And nobody caught it. Not medical, not command, not me." His jaw worked, something raw and furious flickering behind the control he was fighting to keep. "You were exposed to that thing and I didn't even know to look."

"You couldn't have known. Neither could I." Your voice came out steady, cutting through whatever guilt he was circling toward, because there wasn't time for it and you refused to let him carry something that had never been his to hold. "This isn't about who missed it the first time. It's about making sure there isn't a second time."

Leon's eyes held yours, the fury settling into something colder, more focused—not guilt now, just pure, contained intent. "Then we make sure there isn't."

"Nothing goes near my mouth tonight that I haven't watched poured myself." Your grip tightened around your weapon, adrenaline burning down into something sharp and clear. "And whoever's holding that compound doesn't get anywhere near me before we put them on the ground first.”

Through the glass, you watched the Director disappear through a side door, his footsteps fading into some other corridor you hadn't mapped yet. Ada remained a moment longer, retrieving her wine glass from the table with unhurried elegance, and when she finally turned toward the observation door, there was no flicker of surprise on her face at all—no startled reassessment, no scramble to recalculate what you'd overheard. She'd known. She'd probably known since the moment you and Leon had settled into that corridor.

"We go after her first," Leon said, already shifting his weight toward the door, jaw set. "She knows who's carrying the compound."

"She's also not going to just hand it over because we ask nicely a second time." You caught his arm before he could push through, low and firm. "Watch how she plays this. She's not the type to get caught off guard by an audience she didn't want."

You pushed through the observation door together, weapons lowered but not holstered, and Ada's gaze lifted the moment the door creaked—unsurprised, unbothered, exactly as you'd expected.

"That took longer than I expected," she said, setting her glass down with a soft clink. "Though I suppose I should be flattered you both stayed for the whole conversation instead of interrupting halfway through."

"You knew we were there." It wasn't a question.

"Of course I knew." Ada's mouth curved, something sharp and satisfied threading through it. "I've spent a very long time learning to notice when I'm being watched. The two of you are not particularly subtle."

"Then why keep talking?" Leon's voice came out low, controlled, though you could feel the barely-contained fury radiating off him. "Why let us hear all of it?"

"Because your Director," Ada said, and there was an edge in the word your that told you exactly how she felt about the man, "seems to think my previous arrangement with Saddler entitles him to renegotiate terms after the fact. Half payment for double the risk, and an implicit threat if I object. I don't particularly enjoy being treated like an employee." She smoothed a hand along the stem of her glass, unhurried. "So consider what you just heard a small correction to that arrangement. If Saddler wants to punish someone for tonight not going according to plan, I'd rather it be aimed at the man standing in that room a minute ago than at me."

"So you sold him out," you said flatly, "to protect yourself."

"I sold information to a man who insulted my rate," Ada corrected, entirely unbothered. "What you do with it afterward isn't really my concern. Think of it as a professional courtesy, if it helps you sleep better tonight." Something flickered behind her eyes, quick and unreadable. "Or don't. I've never particularly cared whether either of you trusted my motives. I find the guessing keeps things interesting."

"That's convenient," Leon said, jaw tight. "You just happening to feel spiteful at exactly the moment it helps us."

"Convenient, deliberate—pick whichever lets you sleep at night, Agent." Ada's gaze slid to you, something colder and more evaluating settling into it. "I don't expect either of you to trust me. I'd be disappointed if you did, honestly. It would mean I'm losing my touch."

"Then give us the name," you said, cutting through whatever game she was still playing. "If this is really about spite and not sentiment, prove it."

Something almost like approval crossed Ada's face at that, quick and gone. "The compound's already been prepped. Small vial, disguised as perfume, if I had to guess how they'd move it through security without a second look." A pause, deliberate. "The aide who pulled Leon toward the stage earlier tonight is carrying it. Young. Nervous. Not senior enough to know exactly what he's holding, only that he's meant to get close to her and offer a drink personally before midnight."

Your stomach turned cold. You remembered him—the crisp suit, the polite whisper at Leon's elbow.

"Why tell us this," Leon asked again, warier this time, "if you don't care what happens to either of us?"

"I never said I don't care." Ada's tone stayed light, but something underneath it had gone quieter, harder to read. "I said I don't need either of you to believe I do. There's a difference, even if you're too stubborn to see it." She was already moving toward the far door, unhurried as ever, pausing only once at the threshold, not bothering to turn around.

"Little Hawk." Just that, at first, letting the old callsign sit in the air between you. "Watch the aide's left hand. He's right-handed. He'll reach for the vial with the one you're not watching."

And then she was gone, the door swinging shut with a soft click, leaving the two of you with a name, a method, a debt you weren't sure how to categorize, and considerably less time than you'd like.

Leon was already moving, jaw tight with a new, sharper urgency. "The aide's upstairs. If he's supposed to make his move before midnight—"

"Then we don't have long." You were moving too, adrenaline burning clean and cold through every nerve. "Let's go.”

Next mission was simple, find the aide, neutralize him, end of the night. And maybe think twice on who’s is directing the place you work at.

You paced rapidly with Leon beside you and getting into the ballroom again meant retracing your steps and finding your stilettos, abandoned exactly where you last kicked them off. You paused long enough to slip them back on, one hand braced into the wall for balance.

“Really? Now?” Leon scoffed.

“You think I’d go back into the ballroom while barefoot? Yeah, sure. Try again.” You straightened, testing your balance in the heels again, weapon already tucked back into its holster beneath the slit of your dress. “Also, aren’t you the one who has to smile to the camaras?”

“Don’t remind me.”

The door at the top of the stairwell led back into the same gilded hallway you'd left an hour ago, though the clock in your head insisted it had barely been fifteen minutes. The jazz was still playing. The chandeliers were still throwing that same warm, oblivious light over a room full of people who had no idea how close they'd all just come to being collateral damage in someone else's war.

You scanned the crowd on instinct, cataloguing faces, positions, exits, the way you always did—except now there was a name attached to what you were looking for, a face you actually remembered. Young. Nervous. Crisp suit.

“There," Leon murmured, his voice dropping low beside your ear, close enough that anyone watching would've read it as something far more intimate than a tactical callout. And shit, it made your skin get goosebumps. "Near the terrace. Talking to one of the catering staff.”

He placed his hand on your lower back, guiding you both into the garden. Dim lights bathed the terrace, making it —almost— a cozy place to relax if this had been actually an off-duty night and also ignoring the fact that they wanted you dead, too.

You found him easily—the same aide who'd approached Leon before the commendation, standing a little too stiffly near a stone statue, glancing toward the few poeple leaned into the terrace’s handrail, faintly talking about work stuff. Personal problems, desirable normal people problems. Every few seconds he took the task to analyze everyone there in a way that read as nervous energy to anyone who wasn't trained to notice it, and as a man waiting for a specific opening to anyone who was.

Damn rookie, you thought.

“Reminds me oddly of my first mission ever," you said quietly. Almost laughing. Ironic if someone told you that junior aide wanted you infected. “He’s looking for me. Not the room. Me specifically."

"I know." Something in Leon's voice had gone tight, controlled in the particular way he got right before something violent was about to happen. You glanced at him and found his eyes already on the aide, fixed and sharp, but there was something underneath the focus that you didn't usually see on him—something that looked almost like fear, if Leon Kennedy allowed himself that particular emotion in front of anyone.

"Hey." You touched his arm, light, just enough to pull his attention back to you. "I'm not drinking anything he's holding. I'm not letting him within three feet of me. We've done harder things than avoid a drink."

"That's not—" He stopped, jaw working, and for a second you watched him try to file the sentence down into something more manageable before it came out. "I've watched you walk into rooms with bombs strapped to the walls and not blink. I've watched you get shot at from four different angles and just—reload. This is different."

"Why?"

"Because this time it's not about whether you're good enough to handle it." His eyes found yours, and whatever careful control he usually kept stitched over his expression had come slightly undone at the seams, just for you, just for this. "It's about some kid in a suit getting one lucky moment alone with you, and there's nothing you can train for that completely closes that door. I can't—" He exhaled, sharp, frustrated with himself for how much he was saying out loud in the middle of the garden. "I watched that water in Spain for ten minutes because I didn't know if you were about to disappear too. I'm not doing that again tonight."

Something in your chest went very still, then very warm, and you didn't have a tactical response prepared for either sensation.

"Leon—"

"Don't," he said, quiet, almost gentle. "Don't do the thing where you tell me you're fine. I know you're fine. You're always fine, right up until the one time you're not, and I'd like to not find out what that looks like tonight."

You didn't get the chance to answer him.

The aide's eyes had found you across the natural space—found you specifically, not swept over you like every other guest, and something in his posture shifted, deliberate, purposeful. He paused for a few moments. Like thinking and recalibrating what to do next. He leaned into his partner and murmured some words into his side, the man beside him nodded and was already moving.

Not towards us?

You glanced at Leon. Clearly confused on what just happened.

The man approached the 5 people that were on the hand rail of the terrace, whispering something. You observed how those people began walking to the ballroom, leaving the cool air of the evening. Now, you understood. Of course. They were emptying the place before making a scene.

Damn rookie you thought again.

It made your life significantly easier. Now if things got ugly no one was going to be there to witness it. No civilians screaming, and surely no press taking pictures. As the people left, Leon gave you an assuring look, like you both knew what was going to happen next.

The original aide was already closing the distance with two champagne flutes balanced in one hand and something small and glinting tucked against his palm in the other.

"He's moving," you said, all business now, the warmth from a second ago folding itself away into the same cold, ready focus you wore into every op. "Left hand. Ada was right.”

“I see it."

You didn't wait for a plan. There wasn't time for one, and after tonight, you barely needed one anyway—Leon was already drifting three steps to your right, cutting an angle that would put him behind the aide the second the man closed distance with you, while you held your position, letting yourself look exactly as unaware as he needed you to be.

"Excuse me," the aide said, arriving at your side with a practiced, polite smile that didn't come anywhere close to reaching his eyes. "Compliments of the Director. He wanted to personally thank you both for tonight." He extended one of the flutes toward you, his right hand steady, professional—while his left hand shifted, almost imperceptibly, toward the small vial tucked against his palm.

“Really?” You tilted your head and looked at Leon with fake enthusiasm. “That’s incredibly thoughtful," you said, smiling back with the same hollow politeness, letting him get just close enough. "Tell him I appreciate the gesture. To die for.”

The moment his left hand moved to tip the vial's contents into the glass, you moved faster—closing your hand around his wrist in a sharp, practiced grip that stopped the motion cold, twisting hard enough to make him gasp and drop both the flute and the vial in the same instant.

"Wrong hand," you said, low, cold, no longer performing anything at all.

The glass flute shattered against the terrace tiles, spilling champagne and Amber liquid into the cracks between the stone.

Before the aide could even process the pain in his twisted wrist or open his mouth to scream, Leon was already behind him. A heavy hand clamped over the kid’s jaw, smothering any sound, while his other arm locked around the aide's neck in a brutal, efficient chokehold. Leon yanked him backward into the deeper shadows near the stone statue, completely out of sight from the ballroom doors.

"Don't move," Leon growled against his ear, his voice deadly quiet, laced with that same dark, dangerous edge from earlier. "Don't even breathe heavy."

You dropped to one knee, your low-waisted dress pooling around you as your fingers expertly swept the tiles. You grabbed the small, unbroken glass vial that had rolled toward the planter before the liquid could seep away or contaminate anything else. You held it up to the faint terrace light—the deep amber glow was unmistakable.

"Got it," you whispered, securing the vial inside the small concealed pouch at your thigh. "Sample’s safe."

The aide writhed against Leon’s grip, his eyes wide with pure, unadulterated panic as he realized how fast his 'easy mission' had gone off the rails.

Leon didn't loosen his grip an inch. "Who gave you the order?" he demanded, his forearm pressing just enough against the kid's carotid to keep him lightheaded. "The Director? Or someone in logistics?"

"T-The Director..." the aide choked out, tears of pain welling in his eyes. "He said... he said if we infected one of Kennedy's people... the threat would force Federal forces to buy the antidote from us... internal contract..."

"Internal," you muttered under your breath, standing up and dusting off your gown. Ada’s word echoed in your head. Always an inside job.

Leon gave a cold, dismissive hum before driving a precise knee into the back of the aide's leg, taking him down to the floor, followed by a swift strike to the back of his neck. The kid went limp instantly.

“Who even sends rookies to handle these type of situations?” You said while you saw the other staff member who was with the kid run through the grass beneath the terrace as he clumsy avoided the statues and people.

Silence settled over the terrace again. The distant sound of the jazz band inside felt a million miles away. Finally a long deep sigh settled in your lungs.

Leon stood there over the unconscious body, chest heaving slightly, his shirt collar slightly unbuttoned from the sudden movement. His hair was a mess, falling over his forehead, and his dark eyes immediately snapped from the floor straight to you.

He didn't check the perimeter. He didn't look at the doors. He just took three long strides until he was standing directly in front of you, his breath coming in fast, heavy rasps.

The aide was still unconscious when you finally forced yourself to look away from Leon and back toward the actual problem currently bleeding rainwater into his expensive borrowed suit at your feet.

"We can't just leave him here," you said, crouching to check his pulse out of habit—steady, if a little slow. "Someone's going to trip over him eventually, and I'd rather that not be a civilian with a phone camera."

Leon exhaled, dragging a hand down his face, visibly forcing himself back into operational mode. "There's a service closet off the far end of the terrace. I saw it earlier when I was cutting the camera feed."

Between the two of you, it took less than a minute to drag the kid into the closet, zip-tie his wrists with a length of cord Leon produced from somewhere inside his jacket—you decided not to ask—and radio a coded alert to the two agency contacts you actually trusted in that building, the kind of message that would have real security quietly extracting him within the hour without a single headline attached to it.

"That's the sample secured, the delivery method neutralized, and the asset contained," you said, straightening, brushing rain and grass off your knees. "Director's still upstairs pretending none of this happened."

"He won't be pretending for long." Leon's jaw was tight, something cold and purposeful settling back into his expression. "I've got enough on him now to bury his career and probably a few decades of his freedom. Ada's little confession, the aide's statement, the compound itself as physical evidence. He's done."

"Good." You wiped rain from your eyes, adrenaline finally starting to ebb, leaving something rawer and more exposed underneath it. "Then let's go finish him off before—"

"No." Leon's hand caught your wrist before you'd taken more than a step toward the ballroom doors. "Not yet. We're not done."

"Leon, we don't have time for—"

"We never have time." His voice came out harder than you expected, something that had clearly been building far longer than the last ten minutes. "That's the excuse. It's always the excuse. There's always a Director, a sample, a mission report due in the morning. I'm sick of it."

You turned to face him fully, rain plastering your hair to your face, and something in you that had been coiled tight all night finally snapped loose. "You want to do this now? Here?"

"I want to do this before one of us gets exposed to something that doesn't have a clean recovery next time." His eyes were hard, furious in a way you'd rarely seen directed at you instead of a target. "Do you know what it did to me, watching that vial in his hand? Knowing that if I'd been half a second slower reading the room, you'd be the one strapped to a hospital bed instead of him being unconscious in a closet?"

"I had it handled."

"That's not the point!" The words came out louder than either of you probably wanted, sharp enough to startle a bird off the railing behind him. He dragged a breath in, visibly forcing himself back down from wherever that had come from, though the fury didn't fully drain out of his voice. "That's never the point with you. You always have it handled. You handled the spider. You handled Krauser's knife an inch from your throat. You handled getting shot at the docks in Spain and then didn't tell me until I saw the exit wound myself three days later."

"That wasn't—" You stopped, jaw tightening, because he wasn't wrong, and you hated that he wasn't wrong. "That graze wasn't serious enough to report."

"It went through your side, not your arm. I watched you flinch every time you reached for your rifle for a week and you told me it was soreness from the extraction. I believed you because you're good at lying about that specific thing, and I let it go because I didn't think I had the right to push." His voice cracked slightly, the anger bleeding into something rawer underneath. "I've spent two years watching you bleed quietly and calling it professionalism, and tonight I almost watched you get infected with something that doesn't have a clean exit wound to stitch up, and I am done—" his hands came up, gesturing at the rain, at the terrace, at all of it, "—being the guy who finds out three days later."

"So what do you want from me?" Your own voice had risen to match his now, something furious and frightened tangled together in it. "You want me to fall apart every time something goes wrong? That's not who I am, Leon. It was never who I am. If I stop and feel every single thing that happens to me in the field, I don't survive the field. That's not a flaw, that's how I've stayed alive long enough to be standing here arguing with you about it.”

"I don't want you to fall apart." He closed the distance between you in two furious strides, rain running down both your faces now, indistinguishable from anything else. "I want you to stop treating me like I'm just another line in your operational report. I want you to yell at me the way you're yelling right now instead of going quiet and professional every single time something actually matters. Do you have any idea what that does to me? Watching you fold everything down into something manageable, something small enough that it doesn't require anyone else to carry it with you?"

"Because that's the job!" You shoved a hand against his chest, more frustration than force behind it, though he barely moved. "That's what they trained me for. No attachment, no—“

"Then why did Ada get under your skin so badly tonight?" Leon cut in, sharp, something almost accusatory in it. "If you don't do attachment, if this is all just the job to you, why did two sentences from her have you spiraling in a stairwell for ten minutes before you could even function again?"

You froze. "How do you know I—"

"Because I know you." His voice softened slightly, though the intensity didn't. "I know what it looks like when something's actually gotten to you, even when you'd rather die than admit it. You came back from that stairwell different. Quieter. And I spent the whole walk down here convincing myself it was about her instead of asking the actual question.”

"It wasn't about her." The words came out before you'd fully decided to say them, raw, unguarded. "It was never really about her, Leon. She just knew exactly which door to knock on."

"Then tell me what's actually behind it."

"No—" you shook your head, jaw tight, “,that's what she does. She finds the one thing you're not saying and turns it into a weapon. I'm not going to let her be the reason we finally have this conversation."

"Then have it because I'm asking. Not because of her.”

“Oh, stop it Leon. Don’t play that card on me. You know how this works. How us work.”

"Bullshit." The word came out flat, immediate, cutting you off completely. "That's what you tell yourself. It's not true, and it hasn't been true since Naples, and we both know it."

Your breath caught while you shook your head. “Don't bring up Naples."

"Why not?" His voice had dropped, quieter now but somehow sharper for it. "You think I don't remember standing outside that safehouse for twenty minutes because you needed a second before you could walk back in and brief command like nothing happened? You think I didn't notice you couldn't look at me for two days after, or that you started double-checking my six on every op after that like you were afraid I'd disappear if you looked away too long?"

"That's not fair."

"Neither is watching you almost drink poison tonight and then pretend the only thing that matters is chain of custody on the evidence." His hand came up, cupping your jaw, rain-slicked and unsteady, forcing you to hold his gaze instead of looking away like you wanted to. "You don't get to keep doing this. Filing every single thing that happens to you into a report and moving on like none of it touches you. Not with me. Not anymore."

"What do you want me to say, Leon?" Your voice cracked despite yourself, furious at how unsteady it came out. "That I've spent two years pretending Naples didn't happen? That I know exactly how many seconds you stood outside that door because I was counting them too, and I still walked back in and gave a briefing like my hands weren't shaking?"

"Why?" The word came out almost desperate, like he'd been waiting years to actually ask it instead of just wondering. "Why would you do that to yourself?"

"Because if I let you see it," you said, and your voice dropped, quieter now, stripped of the anger, something far more exposed underneath, "then it stops being something I can control. And I don't know how to be good at this job and also let someone else carry the parts of it that scare me. I never have."

Leon went still, something in his expression shifting, the fury draining out of it into something far more careful. "You think I'd think less of you. For being scared."

"I think you'd start hesitating." You held his gaze, unflinching even as the rain kept soaking through everything, even as your voice threatened to give out entirely. "In the field. If you knew how much it actually costs me every time you walk into a room I can't follow you into. And hesitation gets people killed, Leon. It gets you killed. I would rather you think I don't feel any of it than watch you die because you stopped to check if I was okay."

"That's not your decision to make for me."

"It's the only decision I know how to make."

Silence settled between you, broken only by the rain and the distant, muffled sound of the ballroom still pretending nothing had happened. Leon's thumb moved slowly against your jaw, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost all its earlier edge, gone rough in an entirely different way.

"I've been angry at you for two years," he admitted, quiet, almost reluctant. "Not at Ada. Not really. At you, for building a version of yourself so good at surviving that I couldn't find a way in. I told myself it was about her because that was easier than admitting the actual problem was standing right in front of me the entire time, being so relentlessly, infuriatingly fine about everything that I never had an opening."

"I'm not fine." The confession came out barely above a whisper, torn loose from somewhere you usually kept sealed shut. "I haven't been fine since Naples. I don't know how to be anything else around you."

"Then don't be." Leon's forehead dropped to rest against yours, both of you breathing hard, rain running down the both of you in cold, steady sheets. "Just—stop pretending. That's all I'm asking. Not tonight. Not with me."

You didn't answer him with words. You closed what little distance remained between you, and this time it was you who kissed him first—not soft, not careful, but something charged and furious and two years overdue, all the things neither of you had said finally pouring into something you could actually do instead. Leon's hand slid from your jaw into your soaked hair, his other arm banding tight around your waist, pulling you flush against him like he'd been waiting exactly this long without letting himself admit it.

When you finally broke apart, breathless, his forehead still resting against yours, neither of you moved to put distance back between you.

"That," Leon said, voice rough, "was two years late."

"Don't get used to it." Your own voice came out unsteady, but there was something almost like a smile pulling at the corner of your mouth despite everything. "This doesn't fix Naples. Or tonight. Or any of the rest of it."

"I know." His hand found yours, lacing your fingers together, grounding, steady despite the rain. "I'm not asking it to fix anything. I just wanted you to stop lying to me about being fine."

"I make no promises."

"Wouldn't believe you if you did." A faint, tired huff of something close to a laugh escaped him, and he pressed one more brief kiss against your temple before finally pulling back, some of the careful operational focus sliding back into place over both of you like armor being buckled on again. "We still have a Director to ruin."

"Together," you said, steady this time, no argument left in it. "No splitting up."

"Wouldn't have it any other way."

a/n: if you reached the end, thank you so much for reading! again, this took lotssss of time. if you want to make a suggestion for next time, do it! I’m always open to feedback :-) But anyway… does anyone want to know what happened in Naples? 🤭

#leon kennedy resident evil #resident evil x reader #leon kennedy fanfic #leon kennedy x reader #leon kennedy x you #leon kennedy

flirtingfawn

ᥫ᭡. ⋮ 𝒸𝓊𝒹𝒹𝓁ℯ𝓈 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝘨𝓇𝓊𝓂𝓅𝓎 𝓇ℯ𝟺 𝓇ℴℴ𝓂𝓂𝒶𝓉ℯ .ᐟ 𝓁ℯℴ𝓃 .ᐟ

⤷ 𝓼𝓯𝔀. leon is a stray dog of a man. first kisses. 𝟸.𝟿𝓀

leon is overly tired and very grumpy. it’s no surprise really when he rolled home in the early hours of the morning, bruised and so battered from his recent assignment—spain, if you remember it correctly—but since then, he clearly hasn’t slept and his mood is suffering for it. so, you take it upon yourself to fix it for him

“hey, leon?” you call out softly from your spot on the couch and then wince when you hear a cupboard door slamming shut in the kitchen. he’s been banging around in there for a while and truthfully, you have no idea what he’s trying to accomplish and you find it best not to ask, “c’mere for a second, please,”

it takes a moment but eventually, he leans around the kitchen doorframe with a frown pulling at his brows. he looks exhausted, his eyes are sunken in and the dark circles that are discoloring the tops of his cheeks can’t even hide behind the blonde hairs that hang in front of his face, “what’s up?” he asks, grumbling

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