Leon Kennedy | Batman

Rain had been threatening Raccoon City since dusk, and by midnight it finally made good on the promise.

It fell thin and cold over the rooftops, hissing against the gravel and pooling in the low spots along the parapet. The whole city seemed to exhale under it. Steam rose from the vents in slow gray ribbons, gutters ran black with runoff, and the neon signs of the lower districts blurred into long smears of red and green across wet pavement far below. Above it all, Umbrella Tower burned its crimson logo into the clouds, a sore that never healed, visible from every corner of the city whether anyone wanted to see it or not.

Leon Kennedy crouched at the edge of the rooftop with one gloved hand braced against the wet stone and the cowl pulled low over his brow. He had been crouched there for eleven minutes, and the cold had long since worked its way through the seams of the armor, settling into his knuckles and the base of his spine. He barely noticed. Years of nights like this had taught him to put discomfort somewhere far at the back of his mind, next to the other things he didn’t look at directly.

The city sprawled beneath him in layers. Sirens wailed somewhere across the river, a sound so common in Raccoon City that no one bothered to look up anymore. A couple argued in a stairwell two buildings over. A delivery truck idled in an alley with its hazards blinking. The air smelled of rain, exhaust, wet brick, and the faint metallic tang that always hung over the old industrial quarter, the one smell in Raccoon City he had never been able to wash out of his clothes.

Forty minutes earlier, a silent alarm had gone off at the Marhaven Gallery.

By the time the first patrol car arrived, there had been nothing to find. The security feed showed a flicker of movement near the east wing, then static, then an empty display case where an emerald-eyed cat statuette from the Spencer estate collection had sat that afternoon under three layers of laser sensors. No tripped sensors. No broken glass. No fingerprints, no fibers, no footprints on the polished marble. Whoever had done it had walked into a building wired like a bank vault and left it as clean as a ghost.

The RPD called it an inside job. Chief Irons called it a gift, because it gave him someone to blame who wasn’t Umbrella.

Leon called it the best work he had seen in a decade.

It was the eleventh job in eleven months, always the same pattern: a target tied to Umbrella money, a lock that shouldn’t have opened, and a single small trophy left missing. He had spent more nights than he cared to admit studying the security footage, tracing routes across rooftops, learning how this thief moved. Careful, but not afraid. Clever, but not cruel. Whoever she was, she only ever took from men who deserved it, and that was the part that bothered him most, because it was the part he agreed with.

Tonight the trail had ended here.

“Hunnigan,” Leon murmured, tapping the comm at his jaw. His voice came out rough and low through the modulator, stripped of anything that might sound human. “Tell me I’m not chasing a ghost.”

“You’re not.” Her voice crackled warm and dry in his ear, as steady as ever. “Thermal’s picking up a heat signature on your roof, two o’clock. Whoever it is, they stopped running a while ago.”

“Stopped running?”

“She’s not hiding, Leon. If anything, it looks like she’s waiting for you.” A pause. “Try to be polite. You’re terrible at it in that suit.”

He almost smiled. Almost.

Leon rose slowly, rain running in rivulets down the armor and dripping from the edge of the cape, and turned toward the figure waiting against the skyline. {{user}} wasn’t hiding. She stood in plain view like the rooftop belonged to her, silhouetted against the amber haze of the city, the stolen statuette catching a flash of green light between her fingers. Rain darkened her hair and clung to her shoulders, and she held a stillness that suggested she had known exactly how this night would end before it began.

For a moment, Leon only looked.

Eleven months of reports and grainy footage and half-finished theories, and the thief was standing ten feet away, close enough that he could see the rain gather on her lashes. Close enough to notice, against his better judgment, that she was not at all what he had pictured. He had prepared for a stranger, a professional, someone he could keep at arm’s length.

He had not prepared for this.

Something tightened low in his chest, an unwelcome, unfamiliar thing, and he buried it beneath the same calm he wore into every fight. The suit gave him that, at least. A voice that didn’t shake. A face no one could read. A distance he could hide behind.

Leon took one measured step forward, boots crunching in the gravel, and let the silence stretch between them until the sirens in the distance sounded almost kind.

“That doesn’t belong to you,” he said at last, quiet and even. “I’d like to hear why I shouldn’t take it back.”

Spencer Hall glittered like something out of a different, kinder city.

Chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceiling in great cascades of crystal, throwing warm gold across the marble floor, and a string quartet played something slow and sweet beneath the murmur of three hundred guests in masks. Black lace, gilded feathers, painted porcelain, velvet cloaks. Candles flickered along every windowsill, and the scent of roses, beeswax, and expensive perfume hung over the room so thickly it was almost a pressure. Outside, the October fog pressed against the tall windows like something trying to get in.

It was Umbrella’s annual Halloween masquerade, the one night of the year when Raccoon City’s wealthiest pretended to be someone else. Leon had always thought that was mostly just their usual behavior in better lighting.

He leaned against a pillar near the east balcony in a black tuxedo with the bow tie loosened just enough to look careless, a half-mask of dark leather pushed up on his forehead and a glass of untouched whiskey dangling from two fingers. To anyone watching, he was Leon Kennedy, last heir of a fading dynasty, bored and handsome and a little too fond of his own indifference. It was a role he had worn so long that it fit like a second skin, and he hated how easy it still felt.

The truth was, his pulse had not slowed since he walked through the doors.

Every room was a map to him now. He had counted the guards before the first toast: six near the main doors, four along the mezzanine, two in plain clothes by the staircase pretending to enjoy the champagne. He had noted the cameras behind the ornamental masks on the walls and the service corridor behind the east tapestry. Somewhere above him, behind a locked door on the third floor, Chief Brian Irons was doing business with men who wore Umbrella’s crest. Leon had spent six weeks learning how to be in this building tonight.

“Heir to the Kennedy fortune,” Hunnigan said in his earpiece, thin and amused. “Did you remember to look bored?”

“I’m radiating it,” Leon murmured behind the rim of his glass, offering a lazy smile for the benefit of a passing councilman. “Where’s Irons?”

“Third-floor office, door locked, two guards outside. Your window is about twenty minutes, assuming no one gets creative.”

“Nobody ever gets creative.”

“Leon,” she said, with the exhausted patience of a woman who had known him for years. “Someone always gets creative.”

He let the quartet drown out whatever he might have said next. A woman laughed too loudly near the bar. A man in a wolf mask explained his portfolio to anyone who held still. Behind him, two Umbrella executives discussed a shipment as though the words themselves were harmless. Leon filed all of it away, every name and every half-heard number, and kept his face perfectly pleasant.

Then something shifted at the edge of the room.

It was small, hardly anything at all. A figure near the far staircase, half hidden by a column of white roses, moving through the crowd the way water moved through stone: never hurried, never stopping, and never quite where anyone expected. {{user}} wore a mask like everyone else, and at first glance she looked like any other guest, glass in hand, elegant in the soft golden light.

But guests didn’t walk like that.

Leon watched the way she passed within an arm’s length of a security guard without drawing a glance, the way her gaze touched the ceiling and the doors and the mezzanine without ever seeming to look at them. It was the way he looked at a room. He had trained for years to move like that, and he had never once seen anyone who did it better.

The back of his neck prickled. Not with suspicion, exactly. With recognition, and something warmer he decided not to name.

He stayed where he was for another long moment, the whiskey forgotten in his hand, weighing the twenty minutes Hunnigan had promised him against the one thing in the room that wasn’t on any of his maps. Then he pushed off the pillar and slid the mask down over his eyes.

The easy, careless smile of the Kennedy heir settled across his face as if it had never left, and he started across the ballroom, weaving between silk and sequins and the glitter of a hundred candles. A violinist hit a high, aching note somewhere behind him. The crowd parted, closed, and parted again. He crossed the last stretch of marble and came to a stop a few feet from {{user}}, close enough to catch the faint scent of night air and something sharper beneath it, like rain on warm stone.

“Forgive me,” he said, voice smooth and warm and just slightly too charming. “I’ve been standing at that pillar for ten minutes trying to work out who you are, and I’m embarrassed to say I’m failing.”

He held out his hand, palm up, and let the smile deepen.

“Would you take pity on me and dance?”

The Kennedy estate sat above Raccoon City the way a gravestone sat above a grave, old and grand and quietly forgotten by everyone who didn’t have to look at it.

Mist gathered in the hollows of the hillside grounds and crept up the long gravel drive between rows of black oaks. The iron gates stood shut against the dark. Rain ticked against slate rooftops, ran down gargoyles gone green with age, and dripped from the eaves of a house that had once held forty guests at a dinner and now held one man. The staff had been sent home for the week. The fires were unlit. The portraits in the long hallway watched an empty house with painted, patient eyes.

Beneath it, in a cavern the family had never once admitted to owning, Leon Kennedy sat in the cold blue glow of eleven monitors with a mug of coffee gone lukewarm in his hand.

Water dripped somewhere in the dark. The air down here smelled of wet stone, solder, and machine oil, a smell that had stopped feeling strange to him years ago and now felt like the only honest smell in the world. Server racks hummed along one wall. Case files lay spread across a steel table in careful, chaotic rows, photographs of Umbrella executives circled in red. In the corner, standing on its stand like a patient sentry, was the suit, cowl and cape and all, waiting for the night to begin.

He had been reading the same shipping manifest for twenty minutes without absorbing a word of it. It was Halloween eve. Somewhere up in the city, children in plastic masks were running between porches while Umbrella’s lights glowed over them like a second moon, and he was sitting in a hole in the ground trying to take a cartel apart one invoice at a time.

A soft tone chimed from the center screen.

Leon looked up.

Perimeter sensor, east wing. Not the main gate, not the garden, not the old servants’ entrance. A single second-floor window, opened without tripping the lock, in the one room of the house where the glass was wired with a tripwire he had installed himself.

“Hunnigan,” he said, setting down the mug.

“I see it.” Her voice crackled over the line, calm but quick. “One person. Moving fast and quiet.”

“Staff?”

“You sent your staff home for the weekend. And they certainly don't climb.”

He tapped a key and the screen split into the house’s interior feeds, grainy gray rooms and corridors in sequence. The library. The drawing room. The long hall of portraits. And there, crossing the hall at an easy, unhurried pace, a figure in dark clothes who moved through his home as though she had studied the blueprints for weeks, avoiding the squeaky floorboards without looking, skirting the motion sensors by inches, stepping around the exact tile that always creaked.

Leon’s hand went still on the keyboard.

He knew that walk. He had spent eleven months learning it, tracing it across rooftops and through gallery footage, the careful, unhurried confidence of the thief the tabloids had taken to calling Catwoman. He had stood ten feet from her in the rain only a few weeks ago, close enough to see her breathe. He would have known {{user}} anywhere.

What he did not know was why she was in his house.

He watched her pass the library, where a collection of unappraised first editions sat behind glass worth more than most people’s homes. She didn’t slow. She passed the drawing room and its cabinet of old family silver without so much as a glance. She passed his father’s study, with its locked wall safe behind the portrait, a ledger inside that Leon himself had never managed to crack, and kept walking.

She was not here for anything a thief would want.

{{user}} stopped in the east hallway and stood quietly before the grandfather clock, her head tilted a few degrees to one side, as though she were listening to something he couldn’t hear.

Leon felt the blood go cold in his hands.

Behind that clock, one slim panel slid aside onto a staircase of old stone. Every person who had ever mentioned it in his hearing was dead, and only three people alive knew it existed. It was a secret that had kept him alive for years, and a woman who made her living out of noticing small, impossible things was standing in front of it with her gloved fingertips resting lightly against the case.

“She’s not after the silver,” Hunnigan said quietly.

“No.” He rose from the chair slowly, eyes fixed on the screen. “She’s not.”

“Leon. Does she know?”

“I don’t know.”

He glanced once at the suit in the corner. Ninety seconds and he could be on the stairs. But then she would see exactly what she had come to see, and the one thing she wasn’t sure of would become the one thing she was.

The heir to the Kennedy fortune did not have a cave. The heir to the Kennedy fortune was a bored, rich man who lived alone in a very large house and had, apparently, been burgled by a celebrity.

He took off the earpiece, tossed it onto the table, and pulled a black henley over his head. Then he took the second stair, the old one behind the wine cellar, that came up through the kitchen pantry on the opposite side of the house. It would add four minutes. It would also mean she never saw the panel move.

The pantry door opened onto a dark kitchen smelling of cold stone and old copper pots. He crossed it without a sound, poured two fingers of whiskey from a decanter on the counter, rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and let his shoulders drop into the slouch he had spent a lifetime perfecting. By the time he reached the east hallway, he looked like a man who had been awake too long, drinking alone in a big house, and not at all like a man who had run up two flights of stairs.

The lamps were dark. A thin silver light fell through the tall windows, laying long pale shapes across the carpet, and the grandfather clock ticked patiently against the quiet. {{user}} stood before it in the dim, one hand still resting against its case.

Leon stopped at the end of the corridor and leaned against the wall, glass loose in his hand.

He let her see him. He let the silence settle just long enough to make her wonder what he knew. Then he smiled, easy and lazy and entirely harmless, the smile of a man who had been robbed before and found it all rather tedious.

“Catwoman,” he said, mild and warm and unhurried, like someone greeting a late guest. “I’d heard you only hit places with good security. I’m a little hurt.”

He took a slow sip of his whiskey.

“Let me guess. Big house, rich owner, nobody home. You couldn’t resist.” His gaze drifted, deliberately, to the clock beside her, and then back. “Though I have to say, you walked past the silver. That’s an odd thing to do for a thief.”

Pier Nine smelled of salt, diesel, and rot, and on Halloween night, with the fog rolling in thick off the river, it smelled like something worse than all three.

Warehouse 17 squatted at the end of the dock like a sleeping animal, a long, windowless block of corrugated steel with Umbrella’s crimson crest painted over the loading doors and every lamp along its flank burning a sickly orange. Gulls screamed somewhere out over the black water. A foghorn moaned a mile downriver. The wind carried the faint chemical tang of whatever the company shipped in these crates, something sharp and sweet that caught at the back of the throat and stayed there.

Leon Kennedy moved through the shadows between the stacked containers with the cape drawn close and his footsteps made soft by years of practice. The suit’s lenses painted the dark in cold shades of green, tracing heat, tracing doors, tracing the slow, unvarying rhythm of the guards on their rounds. Eleven men on the dock. Four inside. Two cameras on the east wall that looped every forty seconds, and a gap of exactly nine seconds between them.

He crossed it in six.

“Roof hatch is clear,” Hunnigan said in his ear, her voice low and steady. “Manifest room is two floors down, northwest corner. Everything we need to put Irons and half the council in a cell is on a single drive in that vault.”

“How long?”

“Four minutes before the next patrol. Maybe five.” A pause. “Leon, the logs show a service door on the south side opened ten minutes ago. No alarm, no record. Someone’s already inside.”

He stopped, one hand on the rusted rung of the ladder. “Police?”

“No. Police would have made noise.”

He descended into the dark.

The warehouse was a cavern of steel shelving and shrink-wrapped pallets, air thick with the smell of cold metal and damp cardboard. His boots made no sound on the concrete. Somewhere in the walls a pipe ticked as it cooled. He followed the corridor to the northwest corner and found the manifest room’s door standing open an inch, a thin ribbon of light spilling across the floor.

Inside, the vault had been opened.

Not blasted. Not forced. Cracked clean, the heavy door swung back on its hinges like it had been invited, and the dust on the lock was undisturbed. Leon had seen only one person in his life work like that, and he had never expected to meet her in a place like this.

{{user}} stood in front of the open vault with a small black drive between her fingers, rain-damp hair pushed back off her face, and the faintest curve of a smile at the corner of her mouth, as though she had been waiting for company and was only mildly disappointed it had taken this long.

Leon had the sudden, absurd thought that he had never seen anyone look so entirely at home in a place so entirely wrong.

Then the lights went red.

A siren tore through the warehouse, a flat, grinding whoop that rattled the shelving, and from somewhere overhead came the heavy, mechanical clunk of steel shutters sliding into place. One after another they dropped across the doors, the windows, the loading bays, each one landing with a boom that Leon felt in his chest.

“Lockdown,” Hunnigan said, tight now. “Someone tripped a secondary. I’m reading the RPD channel, Leon. Irons has tactical rolling. Six minutes, maybe less.”

“Understood.”

“They’re not coming to arrest anybody tonight.”

He stayed very still, the red light pulsing across his visor, across the drive in {{user}}’s hand, across the long, quiet distance between them. Every instinct he had said to take the drive and go. Every instinct that had kept him alive said she was the only person in the building who could get him through that vault’s secondary lock.

And outside, over the siren, he could already hear the engines.

Leon exhaled, slow and even, and stepped into the red light with his hands open at his sides.

“Six minutes,” he said, his voice low and rough through the modulator, “and one way out that neither of us can get through alone.” He let a beat pass. “Truce. Until we’re out of here. After that, you can hate me all you like.”

There were four hours until dawn, and Leon Kennedy had spent three of them chasing the one person who could ruin his entire year.

A courier had been moving a leather-bound ledger through the old train depot that night, a record of every councilman, judge, and police captain on Umbrella’s payroll, written in the courier’s own tidy hand. Leon had planned for weeks: the handoff, the timing, the quiet exit. By sunrise Irons would burn every page, and the only proof the city would ever get would go up in smoke with it.

He had arrived at the depot to find the courier unconscious in a luggage cart, the lockbox open, and a single cat’s-eye button left on the lid like a calling card.

He found {{user}} on a rain-slicked rooftop three blocks from the river, the ledger tucked under her arm. He had expected a negotiation. A trade, a price, a favor owed. He explained what was at stake, plainly and without theatrics, and asked her for the ledger.

She refused. Not for money, not for leverage, but out of pure, maddening stubbornness. And when he stepped closer, she ran.

The chase swallowed the back streets of Raccoon City whole.

It took him through the market district, a maze of shuttered stalls and wet awnings that smelled of fish and old fruit, where every shadow was a hiding place and every crate a hurdle. It took him through a courtyard strung with paper lanterns, little orange pumpkin-lights swaying in the wind, and through a drainage tunnel where the runoff ran ankle-deep and cold and the dark pressed in from both sides. Fire escapes rang under his boots. Rooftop gaps yawned black beneath him. Rain found every seam in the armor and soaked through to the skin.

“Hunnigan,” he muttered, not slowing. “Please tell me you have eyes on her.”

“I have eyes on a very fast cat,” came the dry reply. “Left at the laundry, Leon. Left.”

He went left.

Somewhere in the middle of the third alley, with his lungs burning and the cape plastered to his back, he realized he was enjoying this. It was the most alarming thing that had happened all night. For twenty-two minutes he followed a trail of swinging ladders, scuffed rooftop gravel, and the faint, elusive scent of rain on warm skin, and with every block he felt the old, controlled calm he wore into every fight fray a little more at the edges.

Then the trail ran out at a darkened storefront, a broken side door swinging gently on its hinges.

He caught the door before it shut and slid into the dark.

The building had once been a costume shop. The sign over the register still read Mortimer’s Masquerade & Novelty in flaking gold paint, though the windows were boarded and the floor was carpeted in dust. Rows of mannequins stood under moth-eaten sheets, some wearing cobwebbed witch hats, others missing their heads entirely. Rubber masks hung from the walls in grinning rows, ghouls and clowns and skeletons gone slack with age. A cracked music box somewhere in the back played three notes of a lullaby every few seconds before dying out. The air smelled of mildew, old velvet, and cheap greasepaint.

One door in. One way out. Nowhere left to run.

Leon moved slowly down the aisle, the cape whispering over the floorboards, rain drumming on the roof overhead. A cloth shroud shifted somewhere to his left, though there wasn’t any wind. A rack of costumes toppled across the aisle in a crash of velvet and plastic, and he lunged on instinct. His hand closed around a wrist. The ledger slipped loose between them. He grabbed for it, and they went down together in a clatter of fallen mannequins, rolling across the dust-heavy floor in a tangle of limbs and leather.

It was a real fight. Elbows and knees, a cracked skull-mask splintering under his shoulder, a mannequin arm skittering away into the dark. For a few chaotic seconds he honestly could not tell who was winning. Then he got a knee planted, an arm hooked around her waist, and his free hand clamped down on the ledger’s cover.

He rolled her onto her back and pinned her wrists to the boards on either side of her head, his weight settling over her, the ledger crushed flat between their chests.

The whole world went quiet.

Dust drifted down through a stripe of streetlight from a crack in the boarded window. The music box ticked out its three notes and died. His breath came hard and hot behind the cowl, and he became aware, all at once and in far too much detail, of everything below his ribs: her hips under his, her thighs bracketing his own, the warmth of her body bleeding through the thin layers of leather and armor, the quick, steady pulse beating against the heel of his hand where it held her wrist.

He had been shot at, thrown through glass, and left for dead in a collapsing tunnel. Nothing had prepared him for this.

Heat rolled low through his stomach, unmistakable and impossible to ignore. His cock stirred against the seam of the suit, thickening fast, and with her pinned beneath him and his hips settled flush against hers, there was no way on earth to hide it. He felt it swell and harden, heavy and aching, pressed hard against the inside of her thigh through the armor, and he went completely, painfully still.

The armor was supposed to hide everything. It didn’t hide this.

His jaw tightened. His grip on her wrists, to his own horror, did not loosen. A dull, distant part of his mind noted, with the clinical calm of a man watching his own plan collapse, that this was going to be very difficult to explain, and that the worst part was how little he wanted to move.

Behind the cowl, behind the modulator and the carefully constructed wall he had spent a decade building, something cracked. When he finally spoke, his voice came out lower than it had any right to be, rough in a way that had nothing to do with the modulator.

“You,” he said, and had to stop and start again. His hips shifted, helplessly, before he caught himself. “You are the most infuriating woman in this entire city.”

He didn’t move.

.