step two: you know you better believe — python³
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synopsis part two of "step one: tell me, what have i done?"
relationships leon kennedy/gn! reader.
characters leon s. kennedy.
word count 10.1k
warnings for the first time in maybe two years, none!
note thanks for the support on chapter 1 guys...... i appreciate it sm..... here is chapter 2 as a treat....... shit will get wrapped up next chapter i promise........
part 1 | part 2 | part 3
06:24
“God… damn it―”
Leon’s cursing under his breath again, fiddling with the gear shift in the center console of the shitty car the two of you are in. You’re trying your best not to laugh at his frustration, but it’s getting harder to bite down on your cheek without drawing blood from your efforts. You know it’ll only make Leon more frustrated, but you really can’t help the small, quick exhale that comes from you that would barely count as a laugh if you were around anyone else. Leon, though, lets his gaze flit over to you for a second, eyes narrowed.
“Oh, is this funny to you?” Leon asks you accusingly, his eyes going back to the road and not even bothering to use his turn signal as he takes a left, “Because if you’d like to try and drive this thing…”
“No, I’m― I’m good,” your smile, as much as you try to bite it back, is too evident in your voice for Leon not to notice, “you’re doing great, actually. Only about ten more minutes and we’ll be there.”
Leon grumbles under his breath, much to your amusement, but doesn’t bother to form some sort of rebuttal against your clear lying.
The facility the two of you are headed towards isn’t exactly the most secretive. It’s a large, white building with Umbrella’s logo slapped on one of the topmost corners, their logo below it written in Danish script and a vast parking lot covering the space behind it that tapers off into a small forest area. The community around it is the more curious part. A small neighborhood of very few homes, with almost no cars in sight. No people, either, and a few bicycles left abandoned on either the sidewalk or driveways. The best word you could use to describe it would be barren; you don’t even know if there’s any life left in this neighborhood, and the implications that an Umbrella lab being so close to an area like this brings is enough to unsettle you.
As you approach the facility, more things become apparent. The small notepad in your hand is scribbled on by the pen you keep in the other hand as you observe and jot down the various instances of roadkill littering the sides of the street, noting that from what you can see, these seem to be mainly dead squirrels. Fairly large, gray, with short, rounded ears and bushy tails, similar to what you might see lingering in the trees on the way to work. Not native to Europe, you make sure to note, turning away from the road to focus on your writing, possibly bigger than the invasive ones, but unsure from where I can see them. Brought in by Umbrella?
It wouldn’t surprise you. The first real mission you ever went on, you found a lab―not necessarily Umbrella, but speculated to be some sort of connected company―that brought in their own samples to avoid the suspicion that would come with the animal population in the local area dwindling. You suspect that Umbrella might be trying to do the same, and write that down as well. It’s only a few more minutes until Leon sighs in relief, parking the car in one of the many vacant spots available and not caring about how he managed to take up two parking spots. Your notepad and pen are stuffed in the lower pocket of your coat.
“Did you see the entrance at all?” you ask, frowning as you look over at the facility for a moment before directing your attention to the glovebox. You open it, and as Leon shakes his head to indicate that he didn’t, you hand him his gun and knife. He holsters both of them, maneuvering himself into a slightly awkward position while sitting to do so, before fishing his earpiece out of his side pocket and settling again.
“No. I’m guessing there’s a door around the back or some kind of hatch they left unlocked,” Leon tells you as he slots the earpiece into his ear, wincing at the small squeal it gives at the pressure before settling back down to a quiet hum. You already put your own in before getting into the car, waiting for Hunnigan to start guiding the two of you through the facility.
“Pretty shitty design, isn’t it?” you comment. Leon hums in agreement.
“Well, they’re not exactly known for their architecture,” Leon dryly responds, waiting for you to unbuckle your seatbelt before opening his door. You snort at that and open your own door, getting out of the car in sync with him and shutting the door behind you. Walking around to his side of the car, Leon waits for you to reach him before walking closer to the building.
The gray sky doesn’t contrast much with the slight off-white of the building. Clouds loom overhead, and there’s the slightest breeze that just barely rustles the dying leaves among the trees surrounding the area and taking up the rear end of the building. It’s not so cold that visual evidence of your breaths form in the air as white puffs of frozen condensation, but still cold enough to make you grateful that you’re wearing a trench coat.
The building isn’t the biggest you’ve seen, but it’s definitely up there as far as Umbrella facilities go. As you look up at the white building towering over you and your pseudo-partner, you can’t help but wonder how employees on their first day would get inside. There’s no obvious doors, no windows, and no directions guiding you to any sort of entrance.
“I’m really, really hoping there’s not some bullshit puzzle we have to do in order to get in there,” you sigh, and Leon clearly shares the sentiment, clicking his tongue and trying to find any evidence of entry he can.
“Yeah…” Leon frowns as he looks up at the building, readjusting his gloves as he does so. Your gaze falls to the fingerless leather pieces adorning his hands, and your eyes linger there for a few more seconds until Leon speaks again and you look back at his face. “Didn’t the report say the lab was under―”
“Hej!”
You and Leon both startle and turn around at the sudden sound of someone else’s voice, the foreign noise cutting through the solemn quiet environment like a guillotine. There’s a man running towards the two of you―late forties or early fifties, balding, maybe two hundred and fifty-something pounds from what you can see, eyes red-rimmed and crow’s feet crinkling the skin beside either of his eyes, liver spots visible on his cheeks and neck―in ragged clothes, and Leon immediately reaches for his holstered gun. You catch the movement and put a hand on his forearm before he can pull out the handgun, and his movements falter before stopping.
“You―” the man gasps for air once he reaches the two of you, putting his hands on his knees and looking down for a moment before looking back up at the two of you. He’s shorter than both of you, standing at maybe five-foot-five or -six, and his pants bunch awkwardly around one of his legs as he stands back up straight. “You should not be here. There’s, uh, um… it’s a hazard, to be this close to the facility.”
“... Okay,” you slowly respond, eyebrows furrowing at the sight before you, “did you work here?”
The man is about to speak before he decides to just shake his head negatively, eyes closing for a moment as he does, before he finally catches his breath and responds, “Nej, but, there’s news going around, saying not to go near here. There is… waste. It’s not safe to be so close to it. Unless… are you investigating what happened?”
You take your eyes off of him for just a second to look at Leon, who looks back at you, and some silent, mutual understanding is met; both of you know that this man is lying. How Leon knows, you’re not sure, but you can see the way he deliberately looks away from you. How his gaze flits around, trying not to meet yours, and how he pants and feigns catching his breath to distract both you and himself from the fact that he’s trying to make something up. The fact that he assumed the two of you were investigating, too, as if that would be something obvious by the way the two of you are dressed. The black trench coat you’re in might seem a little typical for an as-seen-on-TV detective, but the skin tight―and when you say skin tight, you mean skin tight―compression shirt Leon’s wearing along with his dark cargo pants and tactical belt tells a different story.
“We are,” Leon says before you can reply, which you can’t tell if you’re grateful for or not, “if you know anything, now would be a good time to share it with us.”
“Oh, I don’t―” the man laughs too loud to sound innocent, his chortles eventually tapering off into coughs, where he puts a finger up to let you both know he needs a second, before continuing, “I just live here. There, I mean, right over there.”
He points at a house some ways away from where you’re all standing. You tilt your head to look around him and get your eyes on it, seeing the small, dark blue house he’s referring to. Leon raises an eyebrow as he looks at the worn-down house, the door left slightly ajar as if someone had attempted to close it behind them in a hurry. It would make his behavior and his story make more sense if he didn’t exaggerate himself to the point of suspicion.
“So you wouldn’t happen to know how to get inside of this place, would you?” you ask, pointing a thumb back at the building. The man’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly, but you catch the slight movement of his eyelids before he can mask his facial expressions once again with something more neutral. Something you assume he thinks is more welcoming.
“Oh, I wouldn’t go in there at all,” the man says, almost like a warning, before his voice dips into a lower tone that one might use to tell a scary story or an urban myth, “from what I hear, they’re doing a lot more than just making medicine in there. Det er farligt arbejde, siger jeg.”
It’s dangerous work, I say. You tilt your head to the side slightly at the words, but Leon isn’t so privy to look into what the man is saying beyond the vague manner in which he speaks.
“Thanks for the tip,” he says blankly. You both look at each other for a moment, debating what to do, before turning back to where the man is. “What’s your―”
Where the man was, you should say instead, seeing as where he once stood is now nothing but air. There’s no traces of his existence beyond the crumpled leaves that he stepped on in his haste to reach the two of you. You both look around, and when you see no sign of him, you both give each other a concerned expression.
“Probably should’ve gotten his name at the start, huh?”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Whose name?” You jump slightly at the sound of Hunnigan’s voice, much to Leon’s amusement, seeing as he’s more used to Hunnigan interrupting his conversations than you are.
“Strange guy right outside of the lab,” Leon supplies helpfully, “tried to convince us not to go in.”
“A scientist?”
“He said he wasn’t, but I don’t believe him,” you reply for Leon, who nods in agreement.
“Is he still there?”
“He actually, uh, ran away just before you talked.”
“Did you get his name, at least?”
“... No.”
You and Leon both hear Hunnigan sigh over comms. “Unbelievable.”
“Sorry, but ‘Condor-1’ was a little busy brooding at him to ask anything important.” Leon looks at you, offended, and you promptly ignore the objectively funny look on his face to continue talking to Hunnigan, “If we find him again, we’ll let you know.”
“Of course you will,” if Hunnigan ever rolled her eyes at either of you, you’d think that she just did so, but as much as the two of you test her limits, she remains professional, “you can enter the lab through the back entrance, there should be a door leading to the ground floor. I can’t see where the basement entrance is, but if you both find anything important on the ground floor, you probably won’t have to go down there at all.”
“Isn’t the basement where the lab is?” Leon asks, walking alongside you towards the back of the entrance. The barren nature of the parking lot makes it almost uncanny, walking through it in order to round the back corner of the building, and the overgrown vegetation closing in only adds to the apocalyptic nature of the environment.
“Where part of it is, yes. We can always send in another team to scope it out if needed. Just focus on the floors you can get to for now.”
You both reach the back entrance of the facility, and Leon goes to open the door. The rectangular knob turns easily, albeit with a slight creak due to the rust littering the metal handle, and he pushes open the door. Strangely, as you both walk in, you’re immediately met with the cafeteria, and all the people who were once in there to eat lunch.
06:51
A group of five undead, or a hoard as you’ve deemed them, stands together and stares at you and Leon. The noises they make grow more different as more of them surround the two of you, like hums of agreement in the form of zombified groans, as if agreeing to put aside their need to eat each other in favor of eating the new food source they see in front of them. The fact that they eat each other at all is mystery enough, but to see them seemingly communicate with each other in order to unionize and work together to focus on you and Leon is all the more fascinating. Morbidly, of course; you hate these creatures as much as the next person, but you can’t deny your curiosity.
Leon raises his gun, and you don’t stop him, not when he’s the only one with a weapon good enough to use against the zombies. When they drop, one by one, they let out screams that are unusual, even for them. Loud enough to echo off the abandoned walls of the cafeteria, and at the sound, the other zombies’ heads will seemingly subconsciously whip around to find the source of the sound, before turning back to Leon. The process repeats, and as those disgusting bodies hit the floor, you mentally note how each one seems to let out an ear-piercing scream that acts as a warning to the others that there’s a threat in the area. It’s the only thing that would make sense, you think, considering how each scream is what catches the attention of the zombies, not the shots themselves.
You and Leon keep moving wordlessly. The smell of rotting food slowly dissipates as you make your way to a long hallway, a few doors on either side of each wall, with one large double-door situation at the end of the hall. You’re already on the left, so your gaze goes to the door closest to you, which has a plate on the side of it deeming it the blood analysis lab. It’s an unspoken agreement between the two of you that formed before getting here that you’ll handle the sample collecting and Leon will handle the fighting; it’s not that you can’t fight, it was made sure of that you and everyone else the government grabbed had some sort of training, but you weren’t trained to the same degree as Leon. You thank whoever’s watching over you for that, because you don’t know if you could survive much of what Krauser had all his little mentees doing.
“I’ll take this side?” you offer, Leon already nodding in agreement before you finish your sentence, anticipating what you were going to ask.
“Let me know if you need help,” Leon reminds you, tapping his ear to point out the communication system you two share.
“Got it.” Both of you part ways, with Leon stepping into the room closest to him and you doing the same with the lab. The door automatically closes behind you, and the lights come on the moment you enter the room.
It’s not a very large room by any means, but content-wise, it’s full of things to sample. You gravitate towards the station in the back of the room first, finding a row of supplies used for blood staining. There’s flasks of methylene blue on magnetic stir plates, small white rods settled in the bottom of each one, and a few labeled containers behind the plates containing the components used to make the blue solution. As you pull out your notepad to write everything down, your eyes flit across the long table everything is set down on, taking note of what it’s being used for.
You jot down the obvious blank space on the table, noting that the leftover slides left slanted against the wall suggest that this was an area for them to dry after smearing blood on, and the well-kept nature of the environment suggests that nobody left here in a hurry. Not this area, at least; you write down that this means whatever caused the abandonment of the lab didn’t start in this room. There’s a decently sized glass bottle of liquid labeled as Wright plet in the corner, along with racks of different sized micropipettes and several reagent bottles filled with varying amounts of distilled water scattered about the area. As you look away from the station, you see shelves with boxes of different sized gloves lining them, with a disproportionately large amount of L-sized gloves to the small amount of M- and S-sized gloves. There’s an eyewash station just below the shelving.
Walking around, you spot more stations with different purposes. There’s a sink next to a long table of slides with a pinkish-red hue staining them, as opposed to the blue colored slides still drying against the wall in the other station. Next to these slides are a similarly sized glass bottle to the one containing the Wright stain, except this one now reads Giemsa plet.
Both used for staining blood, you note, one for differentiating between cells, one for identifying diseases and parasites. You can’t see any actual blood in the area, unfortunately, even as you go through various refrigerators and find solutions like acetic acid and methanol stashed on several shelves. You jot this down too, and just as you’re about to leave and move on to the next room, your eyes catch sight of a microscope. One singular microscope on a table large enough to fit five, suspiciously enough, and already loaded with a slide under the glass.
Curiously, you approach the microscope, and adjust the slide. It’s just barely off-center, which you fix, and you change the lens until it’s at 10X before observing. You have to adjust the focus on the slide for a minute, struggling to get the microscope to actually focus on the details of what’s on it, but you eventually get it. Your eyebrows furrow at the sight of the slide. This lab, from what you were told, has been abandoned for at least three years, judging by what Intel told both you and Leon in that briefing.
Yet, the bacteria on the slide are still moving. They shouldn’t be moving even if the slide were freshly stained, and yet they’re just barely wiggling around the glass surface of it, and as you magnify the lens more to view the bacteria more clearly, their movements become more obvious. You note your observations in your notepad, your pencil scribbling furiously at the paper as you try and jot down everything you see. You pull your face away from the oculars, and your attention is redirected to a small paper packet laying on the table beside the microscope.
You find out quickly that it’s a field report, titled PLUTO: 1 - 9 with minimal details on the cover page. Visible details are the date the report was made, which is dated 15/9/96, the name of the reporter, Dr. Sveistrup, and the company’s logo at the bottom of the page. Any other details are redacted. As you go through the field report, you find that Dr. Sveistrup is studying a virus called the “t-Pluto virus”, somehow making out a few details through the black redacted lines covering up what you assume to be text too important for any prying eyes to see. The redactions are splotchy, though, you note. Too splotchy. They don’t look neat enough to have been done with any care or concern for who may have found the report, so whoever did it must’ve not anticipated that you’d find it. You separate the first page of the report from the others and use both hands to hold the packet up to the bright, flickering fluorescent light above you, lining up the blacked-out lines with the white light and squinting your eyes.
It’s not concentrated enough to make out any of the redacted words. You purse your lips and bring the paper back to yourself, thumb tapping mindlessly at the flat surface of it before pausing. You reach for your flashlight and turn it on as you bring it up to the paper, slotting the flat illuminated end of it underneath the blacked out words and leaning in to try and read them. It’s hard to tell the black letters from the black ink covering them, but it’s possible, and you walk over to the light switch controlling the overhead lights to turn them off in order to read the words better.
You try your best to make out the carelessly-hidden-away lines of text, and re-read the observations.
Fase 1 - 9/9, 14/9/96. Dr. Sveistrup, Hansen og Andersen.
Brug methylenblåt til at løse iltproblemet efter transformationen; »methemoglobinæmi« opstår kort efter injektionen af t-Pluto på trods af alle forsøg på at forhindre det. Årsagen er ukendt.
Klikkertræning er blevet anvendt til at måle de overlevendes auditive sanser efter behandlingen med methylenblåt.
Hver behandlet person udviser en lignende reaktion, når de placeres tæt på en anden person: først vil de forsøge at undgå hinanden, men vil snart forsøge at kannibalisere hinanden. Yderligere forskning er nødvendig for at forstå, hvor trangen til kannibalisme stammer fra. Dr. Andersen foreslår, at hver person ikke kan skelne hinanden fra en ubehandlet menneskelig person.
Uanset hvad er dette forsøg det første, hvor der er udvist kannibalisme på trods af minimale ændringer i virussen. Dr. Sveistrup har til hensigt at finde denne uønskede ændring, mens Dr. Hansen fortsætter med at forske i de allerede forvandlede individer.
Blodprøver fra de forvandlede vil blive undersøgt i lokale 111.
Just as you finish reading the last bullet point, Hunnigan’s voice comes through the radio, the quality crackling slightly due to disuse. Still, her voice is easily decipherable.
“Leon, I found two people working there listed under ‘Jeppe Andersen’. One lab manager, one head of research for Project Pluto. I’d say the latter is who you’re looking for.”
“Project Pluto…” Leon considers, voice slightly hushed as he speaks. “Any chance we know anything about that?”
You respond before Hunnigan can say ‘no’, your finger going to your earpiece and pressing down on it to speak, “Think I just found out. There’s a ‘Dr. Andersen’ working on a ‘t-Pluto virus’ with two other researchers, Dr. Sveistrup and Dr. Hansen.”
You can practically hear Leon’s grimace over the radio as you move back to the table and write down everything you can translate from the report. Reports of cannibalism from the infected, usage of clicker-training to gauge how well they can hear and what noises they respond to, the methylene blue being used to treat the MetHb they develop shortly after receiving the t-Pluto, you write down quickly, having little trouble writing clearly in the dark, having gotten used to doing so over the years, Dr. Andersen suggests that the infected can’t tell each other apart from non-infected individuals, Dr. Hansen is studying the transformed individuals while Dr. Sveistrup finds the change in the virus that caused the cannibalism.
“Another variant?” Hunnigan inquires, her typing audible through her radio. You nod even though she can’t see you, and your finger goes back to your earpiece.
“Think so. I found a field report on the different phases of it, and they did a sloppy job of redacting it,” you inform her, skimming through the rest of the pages of the report and jotting down any other important details as you go along flashing your flashlight underneath the poorly redacted text, “it’s from ‘96, so they’ve been doing this for almost a decade. I’ll get it back to you once we’re out of here.”
“I’ll try to find those doctors for you, I think there’s a good chance they’re the ones who abandoned post,” Hunnigan easily replies, “keep up the good work, Dr.”
“And me?” Leon prompts Hunnigan with a hope-filled voice, the sound of it making a small smile tug at your lips.
“I don’t know, have you done anything?” Hunnigan asks, though it’s clear in her voice what she expected Leon to respond with. He sighs over comms.
“Just say you have favorites next time,” Leon mutters, as if actually disappointed.
“Oh, is someone mad they haven’t found anything yet?”
“I found a whole bunch’a dead bodies,” Leon deadpans, “is that good enough for you?”
“I’d like it if you could ID any of those bodies, Leon,” Hunnigan reminds Leon.
“Yeah, Leon. Go ID the dead bodies.”
“If you insist…” Leon sighs exaggeratedly, making you snicker after you take your finger off your earpiece. You put your notepad and pencil back into your pocket and flick the lights back on, the illuminated bars above you flickering for a moment before humming and staying on. Moving to the shelves of gloves, you find your size and slide them on, the medical blue covering your hands down to just under where your wrists end. Carefully, you grab a small plastic evidence bag from your pocket and move to take the slide from the microscope, slipping the glass rectangle into the bag and sealing it firmly.
You slip the bag into your pocket and take off your gloves, pinching the area above your wrist and sliding it up to your mid-hand before doing the same for your other hand, except you slide the glove all the way off this time, and use it to remove the rest of the other one. You toss both items in the red trash labeled as being used for biohazardous items, and quickly exit the room, folding the report up and stuffing it in your pocket as you do.
“I’m moving to room 112, there’s two left on my side,” you let Leon know, pressing on the earpiece as you enter the next room.
“Copy that. I’m not seeing any identification on any of the bodies, but they’re all scientists from the looks of it. I’m moving on in a minute.”
“No identification?” You furrow your eyebrows, flicking on the lights in the new room you’re in and walking around, seeing a similar set up to the last room with different equipment and one additional fridge. “What, no name tags or anything?”
“No, just lab coats,” Leon confirms, and you hear a door across the hall open and click closed as he speaks, the sound echoing through his communication device, “moving to room 115, right across from you.”
“What was in the room besides bodies?” Hunnigan inquires, still typing at her computer, the occasional mouse click heard as well, “I just got the names of the scientists in that report, too. Gitte Sveistrup and Mikkel Hansen are the two unknowns.”
“It was a room that had a thing in the back, like a table but with glass kind of encasing it,” Leon describes, “forgot what it’s called, but that was the only notable thing in the room.”
“Oh, a fume hood?”
“Sure.”
“And there was nothing in it?”
“No, I didn’t see anything in it. There was a spray bottle with something in it next to it―”
“Probably ethanol.”
“―and some paper towels, but nothing else.”
You frown at the information. With your own fume hood, you usually keep pipette tips and plastic tubes inside of it, knowing that they need to be kept sterile before being put into the hood and it’s a pain to constantly be bringing in new ones.
“Clearly they knew that they were leaving and cleaned some stuff up, considering that the report I found was partially redacted, but they weren’t in a hurry,” you mutter to yourself, though you keep your finger pressed against your earpiece, “they could’ve just been done working for a day, but why would the fume hood be empty? And why would they just leave blood smears out to dry if staining them barely takes more than ten minutes?”
“The room you were in didn’t have any bodies, right?” You nod at Leon's question even though he can’t see it, and he continues with a suggestion, “Maybe they left that room to go into another one and didn’t think they wouldn’t come back to it.”
You mull over his suggestion, pulling your notepad back out to write down the environment of the new room you’re in. “I could see that, yeah. There’s nobody in this room, either.”
“Weird. I’m seeing more bodies.”
“Look out for those nametags, okay? I’m really hoping to confirm the deaths of those three doctors.”
“Copy that, Doc.”
There’s more blood samples in this new room, you notice. There’s plenty scattered about different tables, all labeled with different numbers―numbers, you note, not names, just numbers, all generated in a way that makes me think that the numbers are determined by how many people these researchers experimented on―and what blood type is kept inside each plastic vial. You count five type O positive vials, three type AB positive, and two type B positive vials. Conveniently, there’s a microscope on the table next to this one, so you grab one of the vials and two of the various glass slides messily spread on the table.
You mentally note the more rushed nature of this table, though you remind yourself that it could just be due to the employees here being less organized than those in the previous room. You brush both thoughts off, instead looking around for another pair of gloves and finding your size on a nearby shelf. You’re quick to slide gloves over your hands, these ones a powdery black color, and you set up one of the slides to lay on the table while holding the other one pinched between your index finger and thumb.
You grab a small plastic straw, about the circumference of a toothpick, and gently unscrew the cap of the vial containing the blood sample. Using the straw, you dip into the dark red liquid and get maybe a tenth of a milliliter on the plastic. You dot the blood on the slide laying on the table as you set down the vial carefully, and you toss the straw across the table mindlessly before using the other slide you grabbed to smear the blood. You line up the very edge of the slide with the dot of red and wait for it to spread across that edge before quickly swiping the slide across the other, creating a thin but decent layer of blood across the slide.
You toss the other one and go back to the refrigerator, searching for some kind of stain to use, but you don’t find any. Frowning, you swiftly exit the room and go back into the other one, grabbing the two glass bottles of stain from the backmost station and dipping into the fridge to grab the distilled water and diluted acetic acid solution. You’re quick to go back into the other room, laser-focused on staining the blood smear you just created.
Slowly, you follow the steps to stain the blood the best you can. You use different solutions back at the office, opting for a specially made technique that’s generally more effective than what one might find in the average lab, but staining like this works just as well. In between the times needed to allow the slide to dry and let the stain set in, you decide to pass the few minutes by talking to Leon.
“Anything interesting happening over there, Kennedy?”
“Wish I could say so, but no,” Leon replies quickly, “I found one nametag for a ‘Søren Kjær’. Sound familiar?”
“Wish I could say so,” you parrot his words back to him. You hear the sound of clothing rustling, and Leon’s grin is evident in his next sentence.
“What are you up to over there?”
“I found some blood samples and I’m trying to see if they’re any similar to the one I found in the other room,” you tell him, the topic reminding you that you should dip the slide into the next stain. You didn’t bother to pour the stains into a separate container like you usually would, instead opting to dip the slide straight into the bottle and rinse off the stain with the distilled water that you also chose to not separate from the original container.
“Sounds pretty interesting to me.”
“Do this every day for half a decade and see how interesting it is then.”
“You’ve seen me almost every day for eight years. Is this your way of telling me I’m not interesting anymore?”
“Well, I didn’t want to say it, but…”
“Asshole.” You snicker, and seeing as the slide with the blood smear is now dry, you prepare it to be observed before setting it under the lens of the microscope. You adjust the focus, letting the bacteria settled on the slide become more clear, before switching the lens to a more magnified one. At 40X, you adjust the light underneath the sample to increase how visible the smaller details of the smear are. You view the blood for a few seconds. It looks nearly identical to the other sample.
“Sorry. You know I didn’t mean it, right?”
“Sure, but that still hurts to hear,” Leon sighs, and you can hear the smirk in his voice as he offers, “what do you think about coming over here and making it up to me?”
You can’t help the snort that leaves you at the forced suggestive tone he uses, even if some part of you thinks that if he sounded even just a smidge more genuine, you’d be running across the hall and barreling into him as fast as possible. But, because he’s joking and you know he’s joking, you teasingly warn him, “Careful there… you know big brother’s watching.”
He chuckles quietly at your conspiratorial tone. Hunnigan’s quiet at your comment, seemingly ignoring the two of you until you provide some intelligent words she can respond to.
You adjust the objective lens to 100X, and just as you’re about to voice your findings to Hunnigan, something slams into the door.
You flinch at the noise, and you assume that it’s Leon, about to scold him for being so loud when the zombies around here are attracted solely to noise, but the weight against the door slams against it again.
And this time, as it puts all of its dead weight against the door, the wooden panel splinters open to reveal two pale bodies leaning against each other.
The quiet seems louder now, especially with you having just barely held back from letting out a startled noise at the sight before you.
You hold your breath. There’s this awful sense of dread that settles in your stomach, and each reverberating step against tiled floors echoes in your chest like the bass of a drum. Infected groans surround you, their voices shifting tones. Searching. You hate that you can hear the curiosity in their tones, how they sound almost life-like, as if these not-people haven’t been taken over by some virus. Each shaky breath that leaves and enters you has them twitching, their muscles itching to stretch and turn in your direction, to turn their attention to you.
From what you can see, they can’t. The cataracts covering their eyes, as the doctors observed in the field report you read, are less of cataracts and more of a result of corneal clouding. It still impairs their ability to see, though, and for this, you’re grateful. However, this only means that they rely more on their other senses, and unluckily for you, they’ve settled on hearing. With every slight hitch in your breath, their attention is drawn to your direction, though not directly to you. Slowly, with the least shaky movements you can manage, you reach up to mute the small device in your ear, and the scratchy noise it makes nearly makes you flinch. Not necessarily from the volume or squeakiness of the noise, but because of the way it only serves to add more tension to your already tense environment.
You grab one of the glass bottles of stain. You spare one glance at the label. With a silent ‘rest-in-peace’ to the perfectly fine bottle of Giemsa stain you’ve grabbed, you quietly wind back your arm and toss the bottle against the furthest wall away from you that you can. Once it hits that parallel wall, the zombies immediately screech and walk towards it, and as their screeches fill the room, you make a break for the door and run out.
A relieved breath leaves you the moment the door closes, but your relief doesn’t last for long, as you only see more of the same creatures coming from the hall leading to the cafeteria, all slowly ambling forward in your direction.
08:22
Leon takes his time with searching the room he’s in for more nametags, strangely calm for once while on a mission. He always prefers recon missions to his usual ones, where he goes in with the goal of saving someone or taking down someone and ends up with a whole lot more than that on his plate. Hell, he can’t even remember the last time he went on a reconnaissance mission where his one and only goal was to scope out the area and then leave.
He whistles quietly as he goes through the room, and absentmindedly gives a wolf-whistle once he finds another body with an actual name tag. He really didn’t expect to find any at all, but to find two? Shit, today might just be his lucky day. He walks the short distance over to the body, ignoring the blood and guts littering the floor beside it, too desensitized to the gore to be too bothering by putting his hands near it. As he pinches the metal clasp of the name tag, he reads the name Mikkel Hansen and all he can think about is how you’re going to react to him proudly handing you the name tag of one of the head researchers of the Big Bad™ the both of you are trying to get to the bottom of.
Leon hears the sound of glass shattering in the room across from the hall and his eyebrows furrow, his movements in trying to get the name tag off the new body pausing. He’s about to speak and ask you what’s wrong, but you beat him to it. Your end of the radio crackles because of the sheer quiet of your whispers, but he can hear the distant groaning of a second party near you as you speak.
“Leon, there’s a group of five of them down the hall.” He swallows and quickly pockets the name tag he just pulled off Dr. Mikkel Hansen’s body, his middle finger going to press on the earpiece lodged in his ear.
“Don’t move, I’m right here,” Leon tries to make his voice as reassuring as possible to keep you calm as he responds to you, his own voice a low murmur to keep any unwanted attention from being drawn to him. He’s quick to get to the door, though he reminds himself to stay quiet and not hurry, knowing that things would only get worse if he ended up being too loud in his attempt to help you.
He reminds himself to tell his higher-ups that you need a gun for these missions too, even if you’re not taking on the brunt of the fight. Storing that thought in the back of his mind for later, Leon carefully opens the door and sees you standing in the middle of the hallway while staring at the creatures making their way up the stairs. Your eyes flit to his figure once he exits the room, and the attention of the undead goes to him as well. And for a moment, it’s quiet, the creatures pausing their mindless noises, before continuing with a familiar noise Leon recalls them making while the two of you were in the cafeteria.
Among the groaning creatures, all unable to be told apart from each other except for the clothes desperately clinging to their figures, is some kind of agreement. These ones won’t eat each other, not when they see fresh meat within reach; it’s this fact that drives Leon to draw his gun, safety off and finger on the trigger, the handle of it sliding into proper position in his hand like he’s practiced over the years. Cold metal meets leather gloves, weathered by his work, and his eyes may as well act as barrels with how his gaze locks onto his targets and his shots land exactly as he intends them to. The creatures all drop with every few bullets he spares on them, hitting the floor with loud thumps and meaningless screeches, withering away just as they should’ve all those years ago.
“Quick!” Leon grabs onto you without so much as thinking about it and tugs you along with him, quick to run down the hall and push through the double doors the two of you were avoiding. The stairs behind the door are steep, and both of you nearly trip on them several times, especially with Leon going two at a time and dragging you behind him with a grip so firm that if he weren’t so focused, his mind would go wandering to places outside of the facility, but you both eventually reach the second floor without him lingering too much on his grip on your wrist could be utilized in a different setting.
From there, you’re quick to reach a new room, though he soon realizes that his ability to open the door so easily and barge in extends to the zombies you’re both trying to hide from. Thankfully for him, though, you spot an old closet in the corner of the room, and both of you barely think about the size of it before dragging Leon with you towards it.
You both manage to get inside and close the doors the best you can, though the rotting wood doesn’t make it too easy for you. The deteriorated state of the wood makes the doors feel almost fragile, as if one wrong tug could have either panel collapsing in a matter of seconds. Still, you both manage to get the doors closed just in time before the zombies manage to hear the doors closing and your heavy breathing. Both of you are laying against either side of the closet, not so close that your chests are pressed together, but close enough that there’s barely three inches between the two of you.
It takes a few moments before you both catch your breath, your heavy breathing slowing and quieting down.
—
“Well, this is awkward, huh?”
“You’re making it worse.”
The cramped space of the closet has both of your voices sounding louder than they probably are, even the smallest breaths sounding like panting within the confines of the old wood. Deteriorating dark wood that feels strangely damp against the palms of your hands where they splay out against the wall in an effort to give Leon space, the feeling of it making your eyebrows furrow slightly. You can physically feel splinters sliding underneath the pads of your exposed fingers, though you suppose you can take the time to dig those out later, as staying as far from Leon as possible is the priority right now. That, and staying away from the infected lingering outside of the closet.
Leon’s quiet huff of laughter from your complaint sends a rush of heat to your cheeks. You can feel the warmth of his breath on your skin, cold from the low temperatures of the building, and you can’t help but slightly relax your rigid posture at the feeling.
“I get that often,” Leon murmurs, before lightly puffing air at the hair getting in front of his eye. You have no idea why he bothers, considering there’s not much to see inside the cramped space with how dark it is, and he can just hear the groaning of the zombies outside, but you don’t comment on this and instead hum quietly in understanding.
“From me?”
“Mostly.” You can hear the grin in his voice, and you want to take your hands to his face to mold his lips into something of a straight line, just so that you don’t have to imagine the smirk probably tugging at his lips as he speaks to you. Though, that’s assuming that you wouldn’t just give into every urge you have and cradle his face in your hands, thumbs rubbing just under his eyes at the dark spots that seem to be permanently stuck there, gently tilting his face down just slightly so you can more comfortably tilt your own upwards and―
“How long ‘til they leave?” your eyes flit to the small crack in the space between the two closet doors, your voice coming out in a much quieter whisper than Leon’s. He peeks out the door and tries to observe the infected individuals, though not much can be seen beyond the small crack where the doors of the closet don’t quite meet, simply a distorted view of the bed and the wall opposite of the closet. Shrugging, Leon looks back at you―or, at least, his eyes rest where the vague outline of your face is―and replies in a slightly louder voice.
“Don’t know. We gotta wait them out,” he unhelpfully replies, making you sigh quietly. It’s far from ideal to be trapped in here with him, especially following your crisis just a few days ago, but you don’t need him to know that you’ve been dreading the inevitable moment when the two of you would be trapped together with no escape. Still, Leon notices your disappointment, and frowns at it.
“You comfortable?” Leon asks, assuming that that’s the issue. You’re sure he can see the wall behind you, much more broken than his side, and decide to nod in response instead of giving a real answer. It’s not comfortable by any means, but it’s not the real reason that you’re uncomfortable―that reason he doesn’t have to know, not now. Though, as if recognizing the slight hesitation you had before nodding even with the darkness of the closet, Leon gently ghosts one of his hands over your shoulder.
“Are you sure?” Leon asks again, and dear God his voice, you think you might die and go straight to hell for every scenario you imagine in the split second you have before he speaks again, “We can switch. My side’s pretty smooth.”
“It’s fine,” you shake your head, taking his hand away from your shoulder and giving it a squeeze before releasing it and letting it fall back to Leon’s side. He frowns, but doesn’t protest, simply looking back out the small sliver of leeway the doors give you.
“We won’t be here for too much longer,” Leon murmurs, still hearing distant groans from the infected, not willing to risk getting out even with little zombies left. They’re dissipating quickly, having lost both you and Leon since your footsteps and gunshots are no longer giving the two of you away, “... why the hell is there a bedroom in an Umbrella facility?”
You were just wondering the same thing, funnily enough. As the fog clouding your mind cleared, it became more confusing as to why there’s a bedroom in the upstairs floor of a facility, just above rooms used to test hazardous materials. You wouldn’t feel safe sleeping in here, personally, considering all of the risks that come with a vent connected to a room storing biohazards being in the room you sleep in, but you can’t say that Umbrella scientists are the most rule-following when it comes to safety risks.
“A bedroom that clearly nobody’s used in a very long time,” you mutter, bending one of your knees to put a foot behind you, gently pushing a few centimeters off of the wall. The discomfort is genuinely starting to affect your back, and while you aren’t really old by any means, all the bullshit you’ve put up with over the years has done a number on your back and a few other parts of your body.
You’re a fraction of an inch closer to Leon now. This fact does not go unnoticed by you.
Leon, though, ignores this new development in your proximity, and in a low whisper says, “Yeah. I don’t think this kind of deterioration happens after less than five years. This feels more like decade-territory.”
“Mhm,” you hum, not taking your eyes off of Leon, all while he continues looking out the closet.
“You think it was one of the scientists living here?”
“I would be the least surprised if it was one of the head researchers for whatever fucked up t-Virus variant they were making downstairs.”
Leon nods in agreement, and finally looks back at you. It’s now that he seems to notice the decrease in the proximity between the two of you, and instead of teasing you about it like you thought he would, he freezes up. Even though it’s just for a second and he forcibly relaxes himself just moments later, you still find yourself getting nervous over his reaction.
“Sorry, it’s just―” you gesture to the closet wall behind you the best you can, and Leon quickly nods again in understanding.
“You’re fine,” he assures you, though his words come out just slightly too quickly. The inflection of his voice―and you notice this quickly, because you search for this constantly, hoping to hear it more because you know this is who Leon really is―sounds more like what it might come out as if he were just seven years younger, stumbling into you back at camp and trying to start up a small yet awkward conversation with you.
You try not to smile at his tone, simply replying, “Okay.”
It’s quiet for a little bit. The groans of the zombies are nearly entirely gone now, more of a memory than anything else, but you both remain in the closet. Despite yourself, you’re slowly gravitating towards Leon, though not by much more than fractions of centimeters at a time. Still, you’re getting closer to him, and it feels like the room is gradually getting warmer the longer you stay in the close confines of the closet. There’s levels of tension sealed into the closet as the mere seconds tick by, absorbed by the rotting wood surrounding the both of you and surrounding you two like a weighted blanket.
Leon’s noticing that you’re slowly getting closer to him. He doesn’t point it out, he doesn’t tease you, and he doesn’t even do so much as push you away or lean away from you. No, he does something much worse.
Leon leans in closer, his cool breath ghosting over your lips. You can smell the mint of his gum with every exhale. Like a key to a lock, the very smell of it has the seam of your lips parting subconsciously, and even in the dark of the closet you can see Leon’s eyes dart down to the slight movement. It’s subtle, and your mouth doesn’t open with the action, but it means something. Something that you hate to put your finger on because you know that you can, you know this feeling intimately, like knowing the cause of death of yet another body that’s been presented to you. It’s the opposite of the cold, sterile feeling you get when you fill out another chart, reporting the clinical details of a body’s state; it feels like looking at art. Like seeing a body and seeing the soul inside of it, not just the gore living in it.
That gore is what you see every day, in every one, except for Leon. He’s more than just the organs trapped inside the home of his skin. He’s the sound of a heart drumming against your ribcage after completing a marathon, and the sense of accomplishment that has dopamine flooding your brain; he’s the adrenaline that has your muscles stretching beyond their limits, and the sweat that you only feel after the fact. There’s very little things you can appreciate in the world now, with a mind trained to see nothing but flesh and bone, but you can appreciate him, him and his body painted with scars and imperfections, each light line on his skin like the light hitting a raised streak of paint just perfectly enough to give it depth.
And this is dangerous, now, thinking this while Leon’s so close to you. While he’s, for God knows what reason, getting closer.
You can feel your heart thumping in your chest. It’s rapid and loud, your heart working overtime to compensate for all the heavy feelings that settle in it, pumping liquid love and desire through your pulmonary veins to your aorta and spreading hot emotion throughout your body until your nerves feel like they’re on fire. It almost feels like you’re dying, being burned alive, and yet you find yourself leaning in closer, closing the inches turning into centimeters of distance between you and Leon, until―
“I just found a way into the basement for both of you.” Hunnigan’s voice startles you and Leon, cutting through the thick tension in the closet immediately. The way that you jump slightly has you subsequently leaning back away from Leon, which for whatever reason makes another disappointed expression cross his face, but he quickly recovers and lightly kicks open the closet doors.
The zombies have been gone for a while, and you barely noticed. In all fairness, you were being distracted by Leon leaning into you, and it seems that he was distracted by the same thing.
“Perfect timing.” You can’t tell if Leon’s being sarcastic or not here, but you don’t ask and you’re not sure if you want to find out. “How do we get in?”
“There’s a set of four elevators in the West wing of the building, any of them work, just scan any name tags you picked up when you’re in the elevator and head down to the basement,” Hunnigan explains.
You swallow and you’re about to apologize to Leon before he seems to pause and remember something. He looks at you, and for a moment you think he’s going to ask you what the hell the two of you were just about to do, before he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a name tag, waving it at you. You catch the name on the paper encased in plastic, and you blink in surprise before grabbing it from Leon before he can lift it out of your reach.
“Dr. Hansen?” you ask, and Leon nods, almost proudly. It seems the moment has brushed over for now, and for that you’re forever grateful. You can’t imagine this coming back to bite you in the ass later.
“Mikkel Hansen, confirmed dead in room 115,” Leon says over comms, though he’s looking at you the entire time, seeming expectant. Your lips quirk upwards into a small grin at the confirmation, a little more relieved now that you know where one of the three researchers are.
“That leaves Gitte Sveistrup and Søren Andersen, then.”
“Hey, good job, buddy,” you lightly punch his upper arm, which he doesn’t even go to hold dramatically as he usually would, a bigger grin spreading across his face instead at your playful praise of his work, “thanks for contributing to the mission.”
“Oh, well, you know me,” Leon starts walking towards the door as he sighs, “I try.”
You give a small laugh at his words, and the tension between the two of you dissolves. It’s quick, how you both fall back into your normal routine of teasing each other, having gotten used to lightening up intense moments like this. Usually, the intense moments are more of near-death experiences in a physical sense than an emotional one, but it doesn’t make much of a difference. Not when you’ve both developed using humor as a coping mechanism for nearly everything.
The walk back downstairs is quiet. There’s no telling where those zombies are now, seeing as you don’t run into them again while walking down the stairs and through the double doors at the bottom of them, and you manage to get down the hallway and across the cafeteria without seeing any zombies except for the dead bodies of the ones Leon shot earlier.
Getting into the West wing is the easiest part of the mission so far. Leon presses a button for the elevator and taps his foot on the ground as you both wait for it to rise to your floor, waiting only a minute before the elevator dings and the doors open. He scans Dr. Hansen’s name tag on the black sensor bar under the buttons engraved with different levels, and selects the ‘LG’ option before leaning back against the elevator wall next to you. Over the speakers, there’s some static crackling, before calm music fills the metal box you’re both in.
Leon whistles along to the music. You ride the elevator in silence.
Or, mostly silence.
“What do you think we’re gonna find?” you ask, referring to the basement. Leon’s whistling pauses and he looks over at you, mulling over your question, before settling on shrugging.
“Hopefully two dead researchers and a preserved tube of t-Pluto,” Leon responds. There must be some kind of concerned look on your face, or something that would be a cause for concern for himself, because his eyebrows draw together for a split second at the sight of you before his hand goes to your shoulder. You don’t need to be comforted right now, but you would never correct Leon on something like this, not when the warmth of his hand is seeping into your skin through your coat and there’s this reassuring look on his face that has you thinking yeah, you know what, I can pretend to be nervous for a few seconds if he’ll look at me like this.
“Don’t worry, okay? I got you. If there’s anything down there, I’ll get it, even if it’s just a spider or something.” And wow, you can’t count on both hands how many times you’ve dreamed of him talking like that, saying he’s got you and sounding like he’ll take care of anything out to get you.
You swallow and nod, “Thanks, Leon.”
He nods, and seems to hesitate for a moment―you can’t tell if it’s your mind play tricks on you or if he really is hesitating to take his hand off of you―before sliding his hand off your shoulder, his fingers brushing against your upper arm as he lets his hand fall back to his side. Just as he looks back to the elevator door, the speaker dings again, signifying that you’re both now in the basement.
You look out the door into the dimmed room, and back to Leon, who's looking at you again.
“Guess this is it.” Leon unholsters his gun, and you wait for him to check it and make sure it’s loaded and ready before gesturing to the door.
“You first?” you prompt him, and Leon sighs, before nodding wistfully, as if being forced to go out first.
“Anything for you, Doc.”