Leon Kennedy

Nothing really phases Leon anymore. He's seen bioweapons that doubled the size of tankers, humans mutate before his very eyes into incoherent monsters, the spiders you've hauled ass out of the shower and demanded he remove, the field mouse that sent you onto the counter like an old woman in a cartoon, the movie that made you jump out of your skin when the ice-maker in the fridge started up, they might as well be flies to him. He'd seen real horror, real bodies, real gore, shit on screen is almost laughably exaggerated now.

Seventeen years ago, he would've been right there with you, arguing over who was meant to shoo the field mouse out of the kitchen and back into the storm it'd sought refuge from, his stomach might've been in knots facing off with a spider in the shower for his girlfriend. He would've done his damndest to pretend not to hear a bump in the night post-horror-movie-marathon, because as your boyfriend it's kinda his job to die on the stairs, bat in hand, when an axe wielding maniac comes kicking in the front door, but now?

He's numb to it. Only one thing scares him the way movie monsters and nature seem to scare you.

We should talk.

There it is. Three little words. That's all it takes to make him unsure if he'll throw up at any given point for the rest of the day. You aren't his girlfriend, despite everything in him that wishes you were. You practically live together, when he's not being sent around to kill monsters, you've slept with him— actually slept, as in, he felt safe enough with you to actually pass out with you next to him, and he'd slept better that night than he had in years. He's imagined waking up next to you again for months. He opens his eyes every morning since imagining you'd be in the shower or started on breakfast, he sees the state of his apartment and himself, the whiskey bottle on the nightstand where your phone might've been, and he's glad you aren't.

You deserve better, someone who fuels you, someone here to feel the light that comes off of you, someone available enough to be honest with you. He can't do any of that. He can't even love himself, how the hell is he supposed to expect anyone else to? How could he ever love anyone else? It's a torturous 'will he-won't he' cycle, and with every step closer, he stops while he still has the mind to, like touching you would taint you somehow, infect you with the same kind of misery he'd been sinking in. Nothing scares him, nothing but this, nothing more than this. He hadn't thought about his love life, he had his actual life to worry about. Forget his heart on his sleeve, keeping his head on his shoulders was hard enough, but...

He thinks about it when he shouldn't, the way you light up when he gets back, scold him for not letting the medics fuss over him as much as they should. He'd always just slept off most of his injuries, no point in bandaids when he'd be going right into the wringer next week, anyway. You insisted, though, and he didn't have the heart to stop you. He fought bioweapons, he'd killed people, worked under the President, but he wasn't brave enough to tell the girl he was in love with that seeing the stupid bandaids she insisted she use on him was enough to bring him home in one living piece.

We should talk could be about anything, really. You aren't his girlfriend, he has no real ties to you beyond friendship, nothing mutual anyway. There is no 'breaking up' what was never together in the first place, right? Still, he feels like a kid going to the principal's office when he gets back to his apartment, knowing you'll be sitting on the couch with that same anything you'd like to tell me, Leon Scott Kennedy? look. God, you loved to government name him when he worried you. No one else got away with throwing his middle name around the way you did.

He steels his nerves, unlocks the door, and pushes it open, hesitating to actually look up, just in case you're as upset with him as he's afraid you might be.