Project: Sleeping Beauty
Leon S. Kennedy x Wife!Reader
angst / married Leon / happy ending
I LOVE me some angst hehe, please bear with me as this is my 1st post! All credits go to the original GIF creator, and divider credits to @saradika-graphics
Word count: 8.3k
Summary: You and Leon embark on what seems like a routine mission. When an old enemy appears, what could possibly go wrong?
Warnings?! Syringe mentioned. Guns/Blood/GSWs mentioned. Angst, angst, and more angst. Hospitals. No Y/N mentioned
The facility had been dead for twelve years.
That was what the file said, anyway.
Saint Marrow Research Center — a private biomedical annex buried in the Pennsylvania woods, shut down after a catastrophic fire, multiple ethics violations, and the unexplained disappearance of several senior researchers. The government had seized what was left, locked the gates, redacted the records, and left the property to rot under a tangle of vines and old lies.
Then six weeks ago, power started flickering inside the main building.
Two contractors sent to inspect the grounds vanished.
And a D.S.O. informant died trying to pass along a single phrase before his throat filled with blood:
Project Sleeping Beauty.
That was how you and Leon ended up driving through freezing rain at one in the morning toward a facility that should have stayed dead.
You sat in the passenger seat of the Porsche with the mission file open across your lap, tablet light reflecting off the windshield in pale blue streaks. Outside, the road was a black ribbon through dense pine, branches scraping the sides of the vehicle whenever Leon took a turn too close. Rain glided over the glass in steady sheets. Somewhere under your boot, an empty ammo magazine rolled against the floor mat every time the car curved.
You skimmed the page again, then looked up.
“Okay, I’m just saying,” you said, “if I were a deeply unethical scientist building nightmare drugs in a hidden lab, I’d at least give my project a better name.”
Leon, one hand on the wheel, didn’t look away from the road. “You don’t like Sleeping Beauty?”
“It's a princess story.”
“Maybe that’s the point.”
“That’s worse.”
His mouth twitched.
The sight of it tugged at something warm in your chest.
Leon’s smiles had always been like that—small, spare things, as if too much visible happiness might tempt fate into snatching it away. It had taken you a long time to learn the difference between the expressions he wore for the world and the ones he only let himself wear with you. To everyone else, Leon S. Kennedy was sharp edges and weary professionalism, a man carved out of old disasters and held together by routine. But alone with you, in the dark hours between missions and debriefings and the weight of everything he carried, there were pieces of him softer than most people would ever believe.
Dry humor. Quiet affection. The habit of reaching for your hand in the car at red lights without even seeming to realize he was doing it.
You’d met him five years ago on a joint D.S.O. operation in Spain. He’d been impossible to read, too handsome for his own good, and carrying enough ghosts behind his eyes to fill a cemetery. You’d decided you didn’t trust him on sight.
Then he’d thrown himself in front of a knife meant for you and bled all over a marble hotel floor, and after that, things had gotten inconveniently serious.
Now he was your husband, your partner, and the person you trusted most in the world to stand between you and the worst things humanity could build.
Which was probably why it was so easy to lean over and steal the coffee out of his cupholder.
Leon noticed immediately.
“You did not just take that.”
“I absolutely did.”
“That’s mine.”
“You’re driving. You have enough to do.”
He huffed a laugh under his breath. “That’s not how ownership works.”
You took a smug sip. “Mmm. Tastes like marriage.”
Leon finally glanced at you, blue eyes cool and unimpressed in that way that had long since stopped fooling you.
“Give it back.”
“No.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“You’re obsessed with me.”
“I’m literally married to you. That’s not a defense.”
“Sounds like a skill issue.”
His hand came off the wheel long enough to catch the side of your jaw and turn your face toward him.
Before you could say another word, he kissed you.
It was quick and warm and infuriatingly effective. The kind of kiss he used when he wanted to shut you up without actually telling you to shut up. When he pulled back, he took the coffee from your hand and put it neatly back into the cupholder.
You stared at him in outrage.
“That was manipulative.”
“It worked.”
“That was evil.”
“You stole my coffee.”
“You escalated.”
“You started it.”
“You’re driving the car.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t start things.”
You narrowed your eyes at him.
Leon smirked—small, fleeting, there and gone.
Then the trees broke apart, and the facility came into view.
Saint Marrow Research Center sat at the end of the road like something dragged out of a nightmare and left to decay. The main structure was a hulking concrete building wrapped in rusted security fencing and overgrown ivy, one wing partially collapsed from old fire damage. Most of the windows were black or broken. Rain slicked the walls silver under the headlights. The front sign had fallen sideways into the mud years ago, half-swallowed by weeds.
No lights.
No movement.
No sign that anyone had been here in over a decade.
Leon parked beneath the skeletal remains of an awning and cut the engine.
Silence rushed in, broken only by rain ticking across the hood.
You looked at the building, then at him. “If anything with too many teeth jumps out at me, I’m blaming you.”
“Fair.”
“If I die, delete my browser history.”
Leon unbuckled his seatbelt. “No.”
You blinked. “No?”
“I’m reading it at your funeral.”
“Leon.”
“Actions have consequences.”
You snorted and reached for your gear bag.
The humor faded as soon as your boots hit the wet pavement.
By the time you reached the side entrance, both of you were all business.
Weapons checked. Flashlights ready. Earpieces in.
Leon pried the old service door open with one gloved hand and stepped aside to let you slip in first, his free hand automatically brushing the small of your back as you passed. It was a fleeting touch—gone almost before it landed—but it grounded you anyway.
Inside, the building smelled like damp concrete, mildew, and old smoke.
Your flashlight beam swept across a long hallway lined with overturned chairs and water-stained walls. Paint peeled in strips from the ceiling. Somewhere deeper in the facility, a pipe dripped with maddening regularity, the sound echoing through the dark in slow hollow beats.
“Cozy,” you murmured.
“Try not to redecorate,” Leon said quietly.
“No promises.”
Your boots crunched over glass as you moved through the first floor. Reception. Intake rooms. Administrative offices. Everything had been abandoned in stages—some rooms stripped bare, others left as if the staff had stood up in the middle of a workday and never returned. Mold bloomed in the corners. Dust covered every flat surface.
But not evenly.
Leon crouched beside an overturned rolling cart near the nurses’ station and ran two fingers over the floor.
You stepped closer.
A clean streak cut through the dust.
Then another.
Boot prints.
Recent.
You felt the shift in the air immediately, that almost imperceptible tightening that came right before a mission stopped being theoretical and became real.
“Not abandoned,” you whispered.
“No,” Leon said. “Not completely.”
The second floor was worse.
Most of the corridor lights were dead, leaving you to move through alternating strips of darkness and weak emergency glow. Old observation windows looked into lab spaces beyond, many shattered, some intact but filmed over with grime. One room held rows of empty hospital beds. Another had restraints bolted to the floor.
“Fuck me,” you muttered.
Leon didn’t answer.
He’d gone still at an office doorway halfway down the hall, head tilted slightly as he scanned the room beyond. You joined him and looked inside.
The office had been used recently.
A portable generator hummed quietly in the corner. An old desktop monitor sat dark on the desk beside stacks of research notes and scattered files. A thermos still half full of coffee rested near the keyboard. Whoever had been here hadn’t left long ago.
You moved to the desk and picked up the top folder.
The title on the first page made your stomach twist.
PROJECT SLEEPING BEAUTY
Below it, in smaller print:
Induced Somnolence Trial — Neurological Preservation Through Forced Stasis
You flipped the page.
Then another.
And another.
The deeper you read, the colder you felt.
It wasn’t a sedative. Not really.
It was something much worse.
An injectable serum engineered to force the brain into a sustained sleep state while keeping the rest of the body alive and stable—heartbeat, breathing, organ function, all maintained while consciousness was effectively shut down. A living suspension. A chemically manufactured curse.
Test subjects remained unconscious for weeks. Months. In one case, nearly a year.
There were notes about memory disruption. Cognitive fragmentation. Failure to identify loved ones immediately upon waking.
At the bottom of one page, underlined twice in red:
NO REVERSAL CURRENTLY EXISTS. WAKEFUL RETURN, IF ACHIEVED, OCCURS SPONTANEOUSLY.
“Leon.”
He stepped up beside you and took the file.
You watched his expression harden line by line.
“What the hell is this?” you whispered.
“Looks like they figured out how to put people away without killing them.”
“That’s not any better.”
“No.”
You pointed to another section. “There are date stamps from this month.”
His eyes flicked over it.
Which meant someone had continued the research. Here. Recently.
You both heard the sound at the same time.
A soft metallic click from the hallway.
Like a door latch settling shut.
Leon’s head snapped toward the corridor.
The office lights came on.
Not flickering. Not accidental.
Every fluorescent panel overhead blazed to life at once, flooding the room in harsh white light so sudden it made you flinch.
And from just outside the doorway, a woman’s voice said:
“Well. There you are.”
You and Leon moved together, weapons up, pivoting into the hall.
A woman stood at the end of the corridor as if she had been waiting for the reveal.
She looked to be in her late fifties, maybe early sixties—tall, sharp-featured, with silver threaded through black hair pinned into a severe twist at the base of her skull. Lips the color of fresh blood and bone white teeth. She wore a pristine lab coat over fitted dark clothing, one hand resting lightly in the coat pocket. Wire-rimmed glasses glinted under the fluorescent lights. She looked less like a fugitive scientist in a dead facility and more like a professor about to begin a lecture.
Then Leon stopped breathing.
You felt it before you saw it—the way his body locked beside yours, the way every line of him went rigid with stunned recognition.
The woman smiled.
“Leon Kennedy,” she said, almost fondly. “I was beginning to think you’d never find me.”
You looked at him sharply.
He stared at her like he was seeing a ghost.
“Dr. Marianne Vale,” he said.
The name landed heavy.
Not because you knew it—you didn’t—but because of the way Leon said it. Flat. Disbelieving. Furious underneath.
Vale inclined her head. “I’m touched you remember.”
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
“So many people are.” Her smile widened. “It’s hardly an obstacle anymore.”
Your grip tightened on your weapon. “You know her?”
Leon never took his eyes off Vale. “Former Umbrella subcontractor. Bioweapons neurologist. Ran human trials out of Eastern Europe under at least three shell companies.” His jaw flexed. “I put a bullet through her shoulder and left her in a fire six years ago.”
Vale laughed softly. “And yet here I am. Science is so resilient.”
“You should’ve stayed buried,” Leon said.
“Probably. But then I’d have missed this.”
Her gaze shifted to you.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
The look she gave you was not casual interest. It was surgical. Assessing. Delighted in a way that made your skin crawl.
“And this must be your wife,” she said. “I’ve wanted to meet the woman who convinced Leon Kennedy he was still allowed to have something so precious.”
Leon stepped half in front of you before you even processed the movement.
Vale noticed.
The satisfaction on her face was immediate.
“Oh,” she murmured. “Yes. That’s exactly the expression I was hoping for.”
Your pulse kicked harder.
Something about the way she said it—something too calm, too pleased—made the room feel suddenly airless.
“What is Project Sleeping Beauty?” you asked.
Vale’s smile sharpened.
“My masterpiece.”
“Your psychotic little bedtime story?” you shot back.
Her eyes glittered. “A serum that does what death cannot. It leaves the body intact. The heart beating. The lungs breathing. The subject perfectly alive.” She tilted her head. “And utterly unreachable.”
You felt Leon go still beside you.
“What does it do?” he asked, voice low.
“You will find out soon enough,” Vale smirked.
You thought of the notes. The red underlining. No reversal currently exists.
A sick weight settled in your stomach.
Leon’s gun never wavered. “You’re done here.”
Vale smiled like she’d been waiting for him to say that.
Then she moved.
Her hand came out of the lab coat pocket already holding a syringe.
You saw the glint of the needle and reacted on instinct, jerking backward and bringing your arm up—but Vale moved with unnatural speed. She closed the distance in a burst of motion and grabbed the front of your tactical vest, hauling you toward her with shocking force.
Your shoulder slammed into the hallway wall.
Pain burst hot through your upper arm.
“Hey—!”
Leon lunged.
But Vale had already driven herself into your space, pinning you with one forearm and bringing the syringe up in the other hand.
For one awful second you were all tangled motion and impact—your boot slipping on the slick tile, Leon reaching for you, Vale’s fingers twisted in your vest.
Then the needle hit your neck.
A sharp, burning sting just below your jaw.
Vale laughed.
Not a normal laugh.
A bright, manic, delighted cackle right in your face as she slammed the plunger down.
“Yes,” she hissed. “Let’s see how you survive this one, Leon.”
Leon fired.
The first shot hit her in the shoulder hard enough to wrench her backward, but the serum was already in. The syringe ripped free from your neck as she stumbled. You barely had time to suck in a breath before a freezing heaviness exploded outward from the injection site.
Vale staggered, still laughing, blood blooming across the front of her lab coat.
Leon fired again.
And again.
The second bullet hit just below the first.
The third snapped her backward into the wall.
Her laughter cut off in a wet choking sound.
Then she slid down the wall and hit the floor in a heap, dead before she stopped moving.
You hardly saw it.
The cold was spreading too fast.
It poured down your spine and through your chest, not painful exactly, but wrong in a way that made terror spike through you. Your hands lost strength. Your knees went weak so abruptly it felt like someone had cut your strings.
“Leon—”
The word came out slurred.
Your legs crumpled.
Leon caught you before you hit the ground, but your body was already going boneless in his arms, all your weight dropping at once. He hooked one arm around your waist and tried to keep you upright, but the sudden collapse dragged both of you off balance. Rather than let your head crack against the tile, Leon dropped with you, one knee slamming into the floor as he pulled you into him.
You landed half across his lap.
One of his knees was braced on the tile, the other bent under you as he sat back hard against the floor, dragging you fully into the cradle of his body. Your back hit his chest instead of the ground. One arm locked around your middle to keep you from sliding sideways. His other hand came up immediately to cup your jaw and hold your head steady against his shoulder.
“Hey. Hey, stay with me.”
His voice sounded far away already.
You tried to focus on his face, but the overhead lights were smearing into pale halos. Leon’s features blurred, sharpened, blurred again. You could see the panic in his eyes, though—raw and unguarded and so frighteningly naked that it made your own fear spike higher.
“What did she give you?” he demanded, voice breaking at the edges as his hand moved to the injection mark on your neck. “What do you feel?”
“I’m cold,” you whispered.
Your tongue felt too heavy. Your limbs didn’t feel attached properly anymore. Every breath seemed slower than the last.
Leon keyed his comm with shaking fingers.
“Hunnigan! She’s been injected with something—unknown serum, possible neurotoxin or sedative,—send a med team now!”
Static crackled. Hunnigan’s voice came sharp through the earpiece. “What’s her status?”
“She’s fading.” Leon’s arm tightened around you as your head lolled against his shoulder. “We need extraction now. Full medical. Move!”
You tried to lift your hand.
You wanted to touch him. To reassure him somehow, even though you were the one going under. But your fingers barely twitched against his vest before falling uselessly back to your lap.
Leon caught your hand anyway and pressed it against his cheek.
“I’m here,” he said, leaning down until his forehead almost touched yours. “You hear me? I’m right here.”
“I’m tired.”
“No. No, don’t do that.” His voice cracked fully this time. “Stay awake for me. Come on.”
You wanted to.
But your eyelids were getting so heavy.
The cold had reached your chest now, your throat, the backs of your eyes. Not pain. Just weight. A terrible, sinking weight dragging you downward inch by inch.
“Leon,” you whispered.
“Yeah, baby?”
“Scared.”
His face crumpled.
Only for a second, but it was enough.
He pulled you closer, tucking you tighter into his lap until your cheek rested against the solid warmth of his chest, and his chin brushed your temple.
“I know,” he said, voice shredded. “I know. I’ve got you.”
“Don’t leave.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Promise?”
“I swear on my life.” He was shaking now; you could feel it in the arm around your waist, in the hand cradling the back of your head. “I promise. I’m right here. I’m right here.”
Your vision narrowed to slivers.
You could hear his heartbeat under your ear—too fast, too hard.
“Love you,” you breathed.
The words barely made it out.
Leon made a sound that would haunt him later, a broken inhale like the air had been punched out of him.
“I love you too,” he said immediately. “I love you too, sweetheart, come on—stay with me—”
But the darkness won, the world folded inward and disappeared.
Your body went slack against him.
And then you were gone.
Leon
For one terrible second, Leon thought she was dead.
One second.
That was all it took for the world to split open.
Her body went limp in his lap so suddenly it almost didn’t feel real. One moment she was fighting to keep her eyes open, whispering that she was cold and scared and tired, and the next the last thread of tension vanished from her limbs. Her hand slid bonelessly from where he’d pressed it to his cheek. Her head dropped against his shoulder, mouth parted on a breath that was too soft, too faint.
“Hey.”
Leon grabbed her face more firmly, his other arm locking harder around her waist.
“Hey. No. No, look at me.”
Nothing.
He shifted her upright against him, bracing her with one hand behind her neck and the other under her jaw, trying to force himself to think through the white roar of panic in his head.
She was breathing.
Shallow, but there.
Her pulse—he fumbled for it at her throat, fingers slick and clumsy—was still there too, thready and fast beneath the skin.
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
He swallowed a sick, shaking breath and forced his hand away from her neck before he bruised her searching for reassurance that wasn’t going to come.
“Hunnigan,” he snapped into the comm, voice so rough he barely recognized it. “She’s unconscious. Pulse present. ETA?”
“Seven minutes out,” Hunnigan said, and even through the static he could hear the urgency in her voice. “Leon, listen to me—keep her airway clear. Keep monitoring her breathing. Med team is already en route.”
Seven minutes.
Seven minutes might as well have been seven years.
Leon adjusted his hold and gathered her higher against his chest, one arm under her shoulders now, the other hooked under her knees just enough to keep her folded securely in his lap. He didn’t trust the floor. Didn’t trust anything. If he could have climbed inside her ribcage and manually forced her heart to keep beating, he would have done it with his bare hands.
Her skin had gone frighteningly slack under his palms.
“Come on,” he muttered, brushing damp hair back from her face with trembling fingers. “Come on, sweetheart. Don’t do this.”
No response.
He looked at the puncture mark on her neck and wanted to put three more bullets into Marianne Vale’s corpse just for the privilege of killing her twice.
Project Sleeping Beauty.
The phrase hit him like a flashbang.
He looked up—finally, stupidly, too late—toward the open office where the files still lay scattered across the desk. Vale had called it sleep. The notes you’d both skimmed had talked about prolonged unconsciousness, no reversal, spontaneous waking—
Leon went cold.
No.
No.
He carefully lowered you from the crook of his arm just enough to free one hand, never letting your head leave his shoulder, and reached for the nearest folder on the tile where it had fallen during the struggle. His eyes scanned the pages in frantic jerks.
induced somnolence sustained neurological suppression subject remains unconscious for indefinite duration no reliable antidote
His stomach dropped straight through the floor.
“No,” he whispered.
He turned another page. Trial logs. Durations. Thirty-one days. Fifty-eight. One hundred and twelve. Two hundred and three.
His vision blurred.
He looked back at you.
You were limp against him, breathing softly into the collar of his jacket like you were only asleep. Like he could shake you awake in the Porsche after a bad dream. Like the next thing out of your mouth might be some smartass complaint about blinding hospital lights or his shitty driving.
Instead there was only silence.
Leon put the file down with hands that no longer felt steady enough to belong to him.
He touched your cheek.
Still warm.
“Don’t you dare,” he said hoarsely, though he didn’t know whether he was talking to you, the serum, God, or the dead woman cooling six feet away on the hallway floor.
He listened to your breathing.
Counted each inhale.
One. Two. Three.
At four, he thought it had stopped and nearly lost his mind before your chest rose again.
By the time the med team stormed the hallway, Leon was still on the floor with you in his lap, one hand spread between your shoulder blades and the other locked around your wrist to keep feeling your pulse.
The first medic crouched beside him. “Agent Kennedy, we need to take her.”
Leon’s arms tightened instinctively. He wanted to strangle the medic with his bare hands.
It took conscious effort to let them touch you.
“She was injected here,” he said, voice dead flat as he pointed to the mark on your neck. “Unknown serum. We found files—Project Sleeping Beauty. It’s neurological. It keeps the body alive and the subject unconscious. I need those files preserved and transported with us now.”
The medic nodded sharply.
Hands moved in around you—oxygen mask, vitals, IV access. Someone checked your pupils. Someone else slid a gurney into place.
“Agent Kennedy, I need you to let us transfer her.”
Leon stared at the medic for a beat too long.
Then he carefully slid one arm out from under your shoulders and another from beneath your knees, helping them lift you from his lap onto the gurney.
The second your body left his arms, cold terror rushed into the space you’d been occupying.
He followed the gurney all the way to the helicopter.
He never stopped touching you.
A hand on your ankle. Your wrist. The edge of the blanket over your stomach. Anything. Some point of contact to prove you were still here.
On the flight back, he sat strapped into the seat beside your stretcher while the medic monitored your vitals and Hunnigan’s voice crackled updates through his earpiece. Leon heard none of it clearly. He kept his eyes on your face and thought, with detached horror, that you looked peaceful.
Like sleep.
Like this was normal.
Like his entire life hadn’t just been ripped open in a hallway and left bleeding on the floor.
At the medical facility, they took you from him again.
Tests. Bloodwork. Brain activity scans. Emergency consults. Quarantine protocols because no one knew what Vale had actually put in your system.
Leon signed whatever they shoved in front of him without reading it. He stood outside the observation glass with dried blood on his hands and watched doctors move around your bed while machines translated your body into graphs and numbers.
After six hours, one of the neurologists approached him with the file.
“We believe the compound is related to the research recovered on-site,” she said carefully. “It appears to induce a prolonged unconscious state while preserving autonomic function.”
Leon stared at her.
“How long?”
She hesitated.
That was enough to make him want to put his fist through the wall.
“How long?” he repeated.
“We don’t know.”
The hallway went very quiet.
“We’re working from incomplete records,” the doctor continued, “but based on the available data, patients can remain under for weeks or months. In one case, significantly longer. We don’t currently have a reversal agent.”
Leon didn’t say anything.
Couldn’t.
Because if he opened his mouth, something ugly and feral might come out of it.
“She may wake on her own,” the doctor said.
May.
The word hit like shrapnel.
“She may,” Leon repeated.
The doctor’s expression tightened. “I’m sorry.”
He turned away before he did something regrettable.
He sat beside your bed that first night because there was nowhere else to go.
And then the second night.
And the third.
And every night after that.
The first month was a blur of hospital lights and caffeine and denial.
Leon learned the rhythm of your machines before he learned how to sleep again, which was to say he didn’t. He learned which nurse would bring him coffee without being asked and which neurologist actually answered questions instead of dressing uncertainty up in polished language. He learned how to shift you gently when the physical therapists came to move your limbs and prevent stiffness. He learned how to brush your hair out of your face without dislodging any monitors. He learned how to sit still for twelve hours with your hand in his and pretend that the sight of your wedding ring against white hospital sheets wasn’t slowly sawing him open from the inside.
He talked to you even when no one was around.
At first, because the doctors said familiar voices could help.
Later, because the silence was unbearable.
He told you about the weather. About Claire calling every three days to check on him. About the time, Hunnigan came by with actual food and glared until he ate it. About how your houseplants were still alive only because he’d bribed a neighbor to water them.
He told you about the mission report and how the cleanup team had recovered the rest of Vale’s research. About the labs working around the clock to synthesize a reversal agent that kept failing in trial stages. About how every version of the serum was just different enough to make stable antidote development nearly impossible.
He never told you how often he replayed the hallway in his head.
How every night, just as exhaustion dragged him under, he’d see Vale’s hand at your throat again. Hear her laugh. Feel the impossible weight of your body going limp in his arms.
He never told you about the first time he went home and had to walk right back out because your leather jacket was still hanging by the door, and he couldn’t breathe looking at it.
Or how he started sleeping in the chair because the idea of leaving you alone in that room made him feel physically ill.
Or how, around month three, Claire had found him sitting in the hospital chapel with bloodshot eyes and a cup of vending machine coffee gone cold in his hands and said, very quietly, “Leon, you can’t keep punishing yourself for not outrunning a syringe.”
He’d laughed at that.
Not because it was funny.
Because if he didn’t laugh, he might’ve put his head through the stained glass.
Month four brought the first false hope.
A fluctuation in your brain activity. A change in REM patterns. The neurologists grew cautiously optimistic for six days before the readings flattened back to baseline.
Month five brought a potential compound that worked in cell cultures but failed in the lab trials.
Month six brought nothing except winter.
By then, Leon had stopped asking the doctors when.
The question had started to feel cruel.
He measured time in smaller things instead: how often your fingers twitched in your sleep, whether your breathing changed when he read aloud, whether your heart rate shifted at the sound of his voice.
He held your hand and talked to you about stupid things because the important things hurt too much.
He told you about the coffee you stole from him on the drive to Saint Marrow.
About the night you’d tried to assemble IKEA furniture while tipsy and declared the instructions “a hate crime against women.”
About the first time he’d realized he was in love with you—which he had never actually admitted out loud, not even before the serum, because Leon Kennedy was apparently capable of fighting bioengineered monsters but not his own feelings.
That had been in a safehouse in Madrid.
You’d been asleep on the couch with your boots still on, one hand hanging off the cushion, and he’d looked at you and felt something in his chest go frighteningly still and certain.
He told you that, too.
He didn’t know if you heard any of it.
He said it anyway.
By month seven, the doctors had gently started using phrases like long-term care planning.
Leon stopped listening whenever they did.
By month eight, he had memorized every freckle on your hands.
And then one Tuesday morning, while he was half-asleep in the chair beside your bed with a paper cup of coffee going cold on the windowsill, your heart rate changed.
Leon’s eyes snapped open.
You were frowning in your sleep.
Not sleep, his brain corrected with sudden, violent hope. Not sleep.
Your fingers twitched against the blanket.
The cup hit the floor and spilled coffee everywhere.
He was out of the chair so fast it nearly toppled backward.
“Hey,” he said, voice wrecked before the word even finished leaving his mouth. “Hey—come on.”
Your eyelashes fluttered.
Then your eyes opened.
The first thing you saw was white light.
The second was a man at your bedside who looked like he hadn’t slept in years.
Blond hair falling over his forehead. Blue eyes too bright, too wide. Stubble shadowing a face carved with exhaustion. His dark shirt was wrinkled like he’d slept in it, and his left hand was gripping the bedrail so hard the knuckles had gone white.
The second he realized you were awake, something inside him broke open.
“Hey,” he said, voice rough and shaking. “Hey, can you hear me?”
You stared at him.
He looked familiar.
Not in a clear way. Not in a I know your name way. More like a face from a dream you’d had too many times to place.
The monitor beside you sped up.
The man saw it immediately and lifted his free hand, palm open.
“It’s okay,” he said quickly. “You’re okay. You’re safe.”
Your throat hurt.
“Who…”
His expression changed.
Not dramatically.
But enough.
“Leon,” he said softly. “My name’s Leon.”
Leon.
The name struck something behind your ribs.
A spark. A pull. Not a memory yet—just the feeling of standing outside a locked room and knowing something important was behind it.
But when you looked at him, truly looked, all you could see was a stranger with devastation written all over his face.
Your gaze dropped to his hand on the rail.
A wedding ring.
Then to your own.
Another ring.
Your heart stuttered.
“Why do I have this?”
Leon closed his eyes for one second like the question physically hurt.
When he opened them, they were wet.
“Because,” he said carefully, “you’re married.”
The room went very still.
You looked at him.
“To you?”
His mouth parted.
The pain that crossed his face was so raw it made guilt bloom in your chest even though you had no idea why.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “To me.”
The door opened behind him and medical staff flooded the room, asking questions, checking vitals, shining lights in your eyes. Leon stepped back to make room, but he never took his eyes off you.
You answered what you could. Your name. The year. Basic history.
When the doctor asked if you recognized Leon, you hesitated.
Not because you did.
But because saying no felt wrong in a way you couldn’t explain.
“I…” You frowned at him. “No. I don’t think so.”
Leon went still.
The doctor wrote something down.
But even as the words left your mouth, your eyes stayed snagged on him.
Because there was something there.
Something you couldn’t reach.
A ghost of warmth. A phantom familiarity.
And when one of the nurses accidentally bumped his shoulder as she moved past, Leon automatically said, “Sorry,” under his breath in a tone so achingly familiar that your chest tightened.
You didn’t know why.
You remembered him on the second day.
Not fully.
Not all at once.
But just enough.
The nurses had finally let you sit upright for more than twenty minutes at a time, and Leon was in the chair by the bed pretending to read a mission report he hadn’t turned the page on in ten minutes. You were studying him when he looked up.
“What?”
“You look exhausted.”
“That’s because I am.”
“You should sleep.”
“I did.”
“When?”
He lifted one shoulder. “Last Tuesday.”
You snorted before you could help it.
And just like that, the sound of your own laughter cracked something open.
Rain on a windshield.
A coffee cup stolen from a cupholder.
Leon kissing you just to get it back.
Your breath caught.
The hospital room vanished under a rush of memory so sudden it made your head spin.
The Porsche. The dark road. The Saint Marrow file open on your lap. Leon’s hand on the back of your neck. The warmth of his mouth. The ring on his finger glinting against the steering wheel.
You made a startled noise and grabbed the bedrail.
Leon was on his feet instantly. “What happened?”
“The car,” you whispered. “The drive. I took your coffee.”
He froze.
You stared at him, pulse racing.
“I remember your coffee,” you said, dazed.
For one second Leon just looked at you.
Then he sat down so abruptly the chair wheels squeaked against the floor.
“You remember that?”
“Pieces.” You pressed a hand to your temple. “Not everything. But… you. In the car.”
The relief on his face was so sharp it almost looked painful.
“That’s okay,” he said, voice rough. “Pieces are good.”
And then, because your brain had apparently chosen cruelty, another image hit.
A kitchen at two in the morning.
Leon standing shirtless in sweatpants eating all the lucky charm marshmallows from the box while you laughed at him.
Your home. No—your shared home.
Your husband.
You looked at him and the locked room in your head gave way all at once.
Not every memory. Not the missing months, not the lab, not the needle.
But enough.
Enough to know the man in front of you was yours.
Enough to know you had loved him before your body betrayed you.
Enough to know the grief in his face was there because you had forgotten him, and the thought of that hit you like a truck.
“Leon” you whispered.
Leon went still.
“You’re Leon.”
A watery laugh almost escaped him. “That’s usually how names work, yeah.”
But his eyes were shining.
You stared at him, horrified.
“I forgot my husband.”
Something on his face broke in a softer, sadder way this time.
“You were in a medically induced coma for eight months,” he said quietly. “I think you’re allowed a little confusion.”
Eight months.
The number punched the air out of your lungs.
“What?”
Leon swallowed.
The joking edge vanished completely.
“You were unconscious for eight months.”
Your eyes filled immediately.
Eight months.
Eight months gone. Eight months stolen.
And he had been here.
Looking at the state of him—his wrinkled clothes, his hollow eyes, the exhaustion etched into every line of his face—you suddenly understood in one brutal rush exactly how much of those eight months he had spent right here.
“Oh, Leon.”
That was all it took.
He stood too quickly, like he’d almost decided not to move and then changed his mind at the last second. “Hey—don’t cry, it’s okay—”
“No, it’s not.” Your voice cracked. “I didn’t know you.”
His face folded in on itself with quiet pain.
You reached for him on instinct.
Leon looked at your hand like he didn’t trust it to be real.
Then he crossed the room in two strides and took it.
The second his skin touched yours, more memories flashed—your wedding day, his forehead resting against yours after you’d said your vows, the feel of his hand at the small of your back, the weight of his ring against your mouth when you’d kissed his knuckles once in a car after a bad mission because you hadn’t known how else to say thank you for coming back to me.
Tears spilled down your cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” you sobbed.
“No.” Leon sat on the edge of the bed, still holding your hand. “Don’t apologize.”
“But I looked at you like I didn’t know you.”
“You didn’t do that on purpose.”
“But you were here.”
His jaw tightened.
You could see him trying not to let the last eight months show too much.
Trying to protect you from the full shape of his pain even now.
That made it worse.
“Leon.”
He looked at you.
And then, suddenly, another memory tore through you.
A hallway.
A woman with red lipstick in a lab coat.
The glint of a syringe.
Leon shouting for you.
Her manic laugh.
The cold in your veins.
You gasped.
Leon’s grip on your hand tightened. “What?”
“The lab,” you whispered. “She injected me.”
He went pale.
The next images came jagged and fast—the floor rushing up, Leon catching you, his knee hitting tile, your body across his lap, his hand behind your neck, his voice in your ear begging you not to leave him.
Your breath broke.
“You were holding me,” you said, staring at him. “I remember.”
Leon closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, they were full.
“Yeah,” he whispered.
“You were on the floor with me.”
“I know.”
“And I told you I was scared.”
He let out a shaking breath that sounded suspiciously like it hurt.
“You did.”
Tears blurred your vision. “I remember your face.”
That undid him.
Not loudly. Not dramatically.
Leon just bowed his head for a second like he’d taken a physical hit, his hand still wrapped around yours so tightly it almost hurt.
When he looked up again, his eyes were bright.
“I thought I lost you,” he said quietly.
Your chest caved in.
You tugged on his hand.
He came without resistance.
The second Leon leaned close enough, you wrapped your arms around him.
It was clumsy with the IV and the weakness in your body and the hospital bed in the way, but he made a sound like he’d been shot and then gathered you up anyway, one arm around your shoulders, the other bracing carefully around your back as he bent over you.
You buried your face against his neck.
He was warm.
Solid. Real.
Familiar in every place that mattered.
“I’m sorry,” you cried into his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
Leon held the back of your head and pressed his face into your hair.
“Stop apologizing,” he murmured, voice wrecked. “Please.”
“I forgot you.”
“You came back.” His grip tightened. “That’s enough.”
You cried harder.
Leon just held you through it, one hand moving slowly up and down your back while your tears soaked into the collar of his shirt. He was trembling too. You could feel it in the arm around you, in the breath he kept taking like his lungs didn’t know what to do with relief.
After a long while, when your breathing had finally evened out a little, you pulled back just enough to look at him.
He looked destroyed.
And beautiful.
And so heartbreakingly relieved that your chest hurt.
“How bad was it?” you asked softly.
Leon went still.
The question hung there between you.
He could’ve lied.
Could’ve given you the cleaned-up version, the one that didn’t put the full weight of those months on your shoulders when you’d only just woken up.
Instead he looked at you, really looked at you, and something in his expression softened with resignation.
“Bad,” he admitted.
Your eyes stung again.
“Did you sleep here?”
A humorless little laugh escaped him.
“Mostly.”
“Leon.”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “I went home a few times. Claire and Hunnigan basically forced me to. But… yeah. Mostly here.”
You looked at the chair in the corner.
Then back at him.
“You stayed with me that whole time.”
“Of course I did.”
He said it like there was no universe in which he wouldn’t have.
No alternate timeline where he left you to face any of it alone.
Your mouth trembled.
“I love you,” you whispered.
Leon’s entire face changed.
He reached up and touched your cheek with the back of his fingers, as if he still couldn’t quite believe you were awake enough to say it.
“I love you too.”
You leaned into his hand.
“Can you kiss me?”
His breath caught.
The question seemed to go straight through him.
“Yeah,” he said, almost inaudibly. “Yeah, sweetheart.”
He kissed you like you were something returned to him by miracle and sheer stubbornness.
Slow at first.
Careful.
Like he was afraid too much pressure might make you disappear again.
But the second you kissed him back with recognition instead of confusion, something in him gave. His hand slid into your hair, his forehead pressing to yours for a breath before he kissed you again, deeper this time, with eight months of fear and grief and love tucked into the gentleness of it.
When he finally pulled away, he rested his forehead against yours and just breathed.
“I hated that you didn’t know me,” he admitted softly.
Fresh guilt hit your chest.
Leon must have seen it because he immediately shook his head.
“No, don’t. I’m not saying that to make you feel bad. I just…” His voice frayed. “I waited so long to hear you say my name like that again.”
Tears burned your eyes.
You touched his face with shaking fingers.
“I know you now.”
Leon shut his eyes.
A tear escaped anyway.
When he opened them again, he looked wrecked and grateful and so unbearably soft with you that it nearly broke your heart.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “You do.”
Your memory kept returning in pieces over the next week.
Not all at once, and not kindly.
Sometimes it was something small—Leon asleep on the couch with a file over his chest, you taking a picture because his hair was sticking up in six directions and he’d threatened to divorce you if it ever saw daylight. Sometimes it was bigger—your wedding vows, your first apartment, the first time he’d told you he loved you in the kitchen at one in the morning because he’d almost died on a mission and apparently that had finally convinced him emotional repression was inefficient.
And then, one night, you woke from a nightmare with the rest of Saint Marrow crashing back in full.
Vale’s smirk.
The needle.
The cold.
Leon on the floor holding you like he could physically stop the serum from taking you.
By the time your breathing evened out, Leon was already at your bedside, hair messy from sleep, shirt wrinkled, panic still fresh in his eyes.
“It’s okay,” he said, sitting down carefully on the edge of the bed. “You’re okay.”
“I remember all of it,” you whispered.
He went quiet.
“The whole hallway,” you said. “You caught me before I hit the floor. You were holding me.”
Leon looked down.
“Yeah.”
“You kept telling me not to leave.”
His throat worked.
“I didn’t know what else to say.”
The grief in that sentence nearly killed you.
You reached for him.
This time, he came immediately, climbing onto the hospital bed beside you with none of the hesitation from those first days after you’d woken. He pulled you against his chest and tucked your head under his chin, one hand splayed over your back while the other cradled the back of your skull like he still remembered exactly how it felt to hold you unconscious in a dead hallway and pray your heart wouldn’t stop.
You pressed your face into his neck.
“I’m here,” you whispered.
Leon held you tighter.
“I know.”
But his voice shook like part of him still didn’t believe it.
You stayed like that for a long time, wrapped around each other in the dim hospital room while the machines hummed softly around you.
Eventually Leon leaned back enough to look at you.
“You know,” he said, thumb brushing the corner of your eye, “you scared the hell out of me.”
You gave him a watery smile. “You looked pretty scared.”
“I was terrified.”
“You hid it badly.”
He huffed a laugh. “Good to know.”
You brushed your fingers over his wedding ring.
“I remember this too,” you said quietly. “I remember thinking it was the last thing I wanted to see.”
Leon’s expression softened.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” You swallowed around the lump in your throat. “I remember thinking if I had to go under, at least I got to see you first.”
That wrecked him all over again.
He kissed your forehead hard enough to make you laugh through fresh tears, then tucked you back into his chest as if proximity alone could rewrite the last eight months and keep anything like it from ever happening again.
By the time you were discharged weeks later, Leon still looked at you sometimes like he expected you to vanish if he blinked too long.
He slept lighter too.
For a while, any time you woke in the middle of the night and moved too suddenly, he’d jolt awake and reach for you before he was fully conscious, fingers checking your pulse, your breathing, the warmth of your skin.
You never complained.
You just took his hand and pressed a kiss to his knuckles until his shoulders loosened again.
Recovery was slow. Physical therapy was painful. Some memories returned out of order, some all at once, some not at all. But Leon was there for every ugly piece of it—every trembling step, every nightmare, every frustrated outburst when your body wouldn’t cooperate and your brain felt like a house with missing rooms.
And one rainy night, months later, when the world had finally settled enough that both of you could breathe again, you found him in the kitchen staring blankly into a cup of coffee gone cold.
You walked up behind him and slipped your arms around his waist.
Leon relaxed immediately into your touch.
“You’re stealing my coffee again, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Obviously.”
“Marriage is a scam.”
“You love me.”
He turned in your arms, one hand settling at your waist, the other cupping your cheek.
There was silver moonlight at the window. Rain tapping softly on the glass. The kitchen smelled like coffee and dish soap and home.
Leon kissed you once, slow and certain.
When he pulled back, his forehead rested against yours.
“You remember all of it now?” he asked quietly.
You looked up at him.
The man who had held you on a hospital floor and in a hospital room and through eight impossible months of silence. The man who had waited. The man who had suffered. The man who loved you enough to stay anyway.
“Enough,” you whispered.
His eyes searched yours.
“Enough?”
You smiled and touched the ring on his hand.
“Enough to know that if some psychotic scientist ever tries that again, I’m haunting you on purpose.”
Leon barked out a startled laugh.
“Great. Good to know your first instinct in death is still being annoying.”
“Only to you.”
He kissed you again, smiling this time.
And later, when you fell asleep with your head on his chest and his arms locked around you like a vow he would never stop renewing, Leon lay awake for a long time just listening to your breathing.
Not because he was afraid anymore.
Not entirely.
But because after eight months of silence, every sleepy exhale felt like proof that the dead had not won.
And this time, they never would.