Leon Kennedy

The neighborhood is unusually quiet tonight.

Halloween has brought people out into the streets, but the usual noise has started to disappear as the night gets later. Porch lights glow against the darkness, decorations move slightly in the cold air, and the occasional group of people passes by before disappearing around the corner.

You know Leon is different. You have known for a long time. Vampires aren't myths anymore. Everyone knows they exist, and everyone knows what they are capable of. They're treated like dangerous predators—something people can live alongside, but never something they completely forget to be cautious around.

Leon has always been careful about that distinction. He has rules. He avoids crowded places when he's hungry. He doesn't feed from people without consent. He keeps himself under control even when it's difficult.

Tonight, however, something is wrong.

You notice it before he says anything. Leon has been unusually quiet since arriving, standing farther away from everyone else and keeping his hands tucked into his jacket pockets. His eyes keep moving toward passing people before he forces himself to look elsewhere.

Eventually, he exhales through his nose and looks at you. "I'm fine," he says automatically, even though the tiredness in his voice makes the lie obvious.

When you continue looking at him, Leon gives you a brief, humorless smile. "Okay. I'm not fine." He looks away toward the empty street, his jaw tightening. "I haven't fed enough lately."

The admission hangs between you. Leon has never liked talking about his hunger. Not because he is ashamed of being a vampire, but because he knows exactly what hunger can turn into when it's ignored for too long.

He finally looks back at you, his expression noticeably more serious. "And before you say anything, no. I'm not going anywhere near those people outside."

His eyes briefly move toward the street again. "There are too many of them."

Then his attention returns to you, and something in his expression changes. He goes still for a moment, almost as though he'd noticed something he hadn't expected.

"Your scent is different tonight," he says quietly.

Leon immediately looks away again, jaw tightening as he tries to regain his composure. He clearly doesn't like admitting that even a small change can make his hunger more difficult to ignore.

"I noticed it when you walked in," he admits after a pause. "It's making this harder than it already is."

He takes another step back, deliberately putting distance between you.

"So I'm staying over here until I figure out what I'm doing."

His eyes linger on you for another moment, his expression shifting as he seems to put the pieces together. "Wait..." Leon pauses, studying you with a faint crease between his brows.

"You're on your period, aren't you?"

The silence in the apartment is profound. Leon doesn’t move. The simple, clinical question hangs between you, stripping away any pretense.

His blue eyes, always so sharp and assessing, are now pools of pure, undiluted hunger. It’s not a human hunger. It’s ancient, biological, and fixed entirely on you. He breathes in slowly, deeply, through his nose, and a full-body shiver runs through him, a predator scenting prey of the most potent kind.

He doesn’t speak. Words have failed him. Instead, he takes a single, silent step forward, then another, closing the distance with a slow, inevitable grace. The usual careful space he maintains is gone, obliterated by the scent saturating the air, a scent that speaks to the deepest, most primal part of his vampiric nature.

His hand rises. His cool fingers, usually so gentle, touch your chin, tilting your face up to the dim light. His gaze is terrifying in its focus. He’s not looking at you, his partner, in this moment. He’s seeing the source. The living, breathing epicenter of a richness his body screams is his to claim.

A low, ragged sound, almost a growl, vibrates in his chest. It’s not performative. It’s involuntary, ripped from a place of pure instinct.

His other hand moves to your waist, his grip firm, anchoring. He leans in, his nose skimming the skin just below your ear, down the line of your neck. He inhales again, a deep, shuddering pull that makes his eyelids flutter. When he speaks, his voice is thick, distorted by need.

“I can smell it,” he rasps, the words hot against your skin. “In the air. On your skin. In your pulse.” He pulls back just enough to look into your eyes, his own wide with a kind of reverent horror. “Do you have any idea what that does to me? It’s... it’s everything. Concentrated life. A feast my body recognizes on a cellular level.”

His control, that iron-clad restraint built over decades, is visibly crumbling. His politeness, his rules, are being burned away by a more fundamental law.

“I won’t bite your throat,” he says, the statement sounding like a desperate pact with himself. “I won’t take your vein.” His gaze drops, traveling down your body with stark, undisguised intent. “But I need it. I need to taste it. Where it comes from. I need... I need to be inside you when it happens.”

The clinical, formal language is gone. What remains is raw, shocking, and brutally honest.

He doesn’t ask for permission again. The question was the last formality. His hands are on your clothes now, not removing them with care, but clearing them away as obstacles. Fabric tears under the unthinking strength of his urgency. His own clothes are simply pushed out of the way, his arousal freed, thick and aggressively hard, a blunt instrument of his need.

He turns you, his body a wall of cool muscle at your back. There’s no guidance to a bed, no consideration for comfort. He bends you over the arm of the sofa, the upholstery rough against your stomach. His weight presses down on you, pinning you in place. One large hand spreads across your lower back, holding you firm.

You feel him, the slick, broad head of his cock, not seeking an entrance, but pressing firmly against you, smearing himself in the evidence of your own arousal mixed with the unique, coppery scent that has unraveled him. He grinds against you there, a rough, frantic motion, groaning as the scent envelops him completely.

Then, with a final, broken sound, he pushes inside.

It’s not a smooth, loving entry. It’s a claiming. He sheathes himself in one deep, powerful thrust, filling you utterly. A strangled cry is torn from his lips, a sound of agonized, overwhelming pleasure. For a second, he is motionless, buried to the hilt, trembling.

“God... yes...” he chokes out. “There it is... stronger... right at the source...”

He begins to move. There is no rhythm, no technique. It is pure, driving need. His hips piston against you, each thrust deep and hard, aimed with a single-minded purpose. He is chasing the scent, trying to immerse himself in it, to drown in it.

One of his hands leaves your back and slides around your hip, his fingers delving into the wet, heated space where your bodies join. He gathers the mingled slickness there and brings his fingers to his mouth. He sucks them clean with a desperate, starving intensity, his eyes rolling back for a second.

“More,” he snarls, the word guttural. “I need it in my mouth.”

He pulls out of you abruptly, the sudden emptiness a shock. In a blur of motion, he flips you onto your back on the sofa. Before you can process it, he’s yanking your hips toward the edge, dropping to his knees on the floor, and burying his face between your thighs.

There is no finesse. It’s a devouring. His tongue is flat and demanding, lapping at you with a fervor that is shocking in its directness. He drinks from you, not like a lover, but like a man dying of thirst at a desert spring. Low, continuous moans rumble from his throat, vibrations you feel deep inside. His hands grip your thighs, holding you open, preventing any retreat.

He feeds, his entire being focused on the taste, the metallic tang mixed with your own essence. His cool skin begins to flush with a stolen warmth, a faint pink tinge rising on his cheeks. His movements become less frantic, more rhythmic, as if he’s trying to draw more of it from you, to coax the very blood from your tissue with the pressure of his mouth.

When he finally lifts his head, his lips and chin are glistening, stained. His eyes are wild, dark with satisfaction and unsated hunger.

“Now,” he breathes, surging up over you. He pushes your legs wider, his own need painfully evident again. “Now, while I can still taste it.”

He drives back into you, deeper than before. The pace is even more intense, fueled by the direct taste. He’s chasing his own climax now, his thrusts becoming brutal, singular in their purpose. His face is buried in your neck, not to bite, but to breathe you in, the scent now mixed with his own saliva.

“Going to come inside you,” he gasps, his voice shattered. “Going to fill you up while I can still smell it on you. While I can still taste it on my tongue.”

By the time you get home from the hospital, Leon is already in the kitchen.

He's sitting at the table with a newspaper spread out in front of him, reading glasses resting low on his nose despite the fact that he insists he doesn't need them. The television is playing quietly in the next room, more background noise than anything he's actually watching.

You set the insulated container from work on the counter. Leon notices immediately. His eyes move from the container to you, then back again, and he folds the newspaper neatly before getting up.

He approaches with the quiet interest of someone who already knows what you've brought home. He opens the container and reaches for one of the sealed bags. Then he stops.

His gaze settles on the handwritten note attached to it. For several seconds, Leon doesn't move, his expression gradually shifting from mild curiosity to something approaching genuine disappointment.

He turns the bag slightly between his fingers, reading the note again as though he might have misunderstood it the first time.

"You're telling me this came from a patient who had that much garlic?" he asks, looking at you with an almost offended seriousness.

Leon studies the bag again before giving a small, reluctant shrug. "It's probably perfectly safe. But I'm not drinking it." He places it back inside the container with considerably more care than necessary and closes the lid.

For a man who has survived biological weapons, mutated creatures, and situations that should have killed him several times over, the fact that garlic has apparently become an actual obstacle seems almost insulting.

Leon leans against the counter and folds his arms, watching the container from across the kitchen. When you remind him that he was complaining about being hungry earlier, his eyes narrow slightly, a faint trace of amusement appearing beneath his otherwise unimpressed expression.

"I know," he says, glancing toward the container again. "I'm just not that hungry."

A beat passes. Then his stomach betrays him with a quiet growl.

Leon looks down at himself. Silence fills the kitchen.

Slowly, he looks back at you, his expression completely flat. "Don't."

The corner of his mouth twitches despite himself. He picks up the newspaper again, apparently deciding that pretending nothing happened is the only reasonable response, though his attention keeps drifting toward the container sitting a few feet away.

After another minute, Leon lowers the newspaper just enough to look over the top of it, his eyes settling on you with reluctant suspicion.

"...How much garlic did you say?"

Leon has been a vampire for most of his life.

He knows human food well enough. He has spent decades around humans, watched them cook, eaten what he could tolerate, and learned which things were worth bothering with. There isn't much about ordinary food that surprises him anymore.

At least, that's what he believed until he tried strawberry cereal.

You had bought it before. Leon had seen the box sitting in the pantry plenty of times without ever showing the slightest interest in it. To him, it was just another sugary human invention that happened to come in a brightly colored box.

Then, one morning while you were at the hospital, he decided to try it.

You don't know exactly what happened after that. You only know that when you come home, the box you had opened two days earlier is almost empty.

Leon doesn't mention it.

Neither do you.

Until you find another box sitting on the kitchen counter the next morning. Then another underneath the coffee table. Then one barely hidden behind a stack of books in the living room.

The strangest part is that Leon doesn't seem to realize how suspicious this looks.

One evening, you find an open box sitting on the floor beside his chair, the top folded back and a few pieces scattered beside it. It looks less like someone deliberately left food there and more like a cat has been wandering around the house, eating whenever the mood strikes.

Leon walks into the room while you're still staring at it. He stops when he sees what you've found.

For a few seconds, neither of you says anything.

Leon looks at the box, then at you, and finally sighs as he reaches down to pick it up. "Before you say anything, I know it looks ridiculous. I was going to put it away, but I was doing something else and apparently forgot. That doesn't mean I'm leaving cereal all over the house."

He pauses, looking down at the box in his hand.

"Although I suppose that explanation isn't helped by the fact that there's another one upstairs."

You stare at him. Leon gives you a tired look, already aware that he's losing this argument.

"All right. There are two upstairs. But I have a reasonable explanation for that, too. I bought them because I liked it, and apparently I underestimated how quickly I'd go through the first box."

He takes the cereal into the kitchen.

Later that night, you wake up and find the kitchen light on.

Leon is sitting at the counter in the dark, eating dry cereal straight from the box. He looks up when you appear in the doorway.

He looks lke he’s been caught.

He slowly lowers his hand, still holding a few pieces between his fingers. His expression settles into the same calm seriousness he uses whenever he knows he's been caught doing something he can't reasonably defend.

"I was hungry," he says, then glances at the box as though considering whether that explanation is sufficient. "And before you ask, no, I wasn't going to wake you up just to tell you I wanted cereal. I thought I'd be able to eat a little and go back to bed."

His eyes drop toward the box again. "That was apparently optimistic."

You notice the empty boxes on the counter.

Leon follows your gaze and gives a quiet sigh, leaning back in his chair. "Look, I know this is getting excessive. I've lived long enough to know when something has become a habit, and I'm aware that keeping emergency cereal in three different rooms isn't exactly normal behavior."

He reaches for another piece, then hesitates when he notices you still watching him.

"But you've got to admit, this is a pretty harmless problem to have. I'm not hunting anyone, I'm not breaking into your refrigerator at three in the morning, and I'm not asking you to buy it for me."

A small pause. Then his expression shifts with reluctant embarrassment.

"I already bought more."

He looks toward the pantry.

"Quite a bit more, actually."

There is something almost absurd about the sight of him sitting there in the middle of the night, completely serious about a bowl of strawberry cereal despite being a man who has spent most of his life carefully controlling instincts far more dangerous than this.

When you point out that there is another box beside his chair in the living room, Leon glances toward it.

He seems genuinely surprised.

Then he looks back at you and slowly shakes his head.

"I really need to stop leaving these around."

A beat passes.

He reaches into the box again. "...Tomorrow."

The supermarket has apparently decided that vampires need their own promotion.

Vampires have been part of society for as long as anyone can remember. They have jobs, apartments, driver's licenses, families, and ordinary lives, but people still tend to be cautious around them. Too many vampires still choose to hunt humans, and even the ones who don't are often treated with the same uneasy respect people have for something like a lion or a tiger: fascinating, familiar, but still capable of becoming dangerous.

Leon has spent most of his life learning to live with that distinction.

Unfortunately, the supermarket seems to have decided to make it cheerful.

You notice the signs before Leon does.

There are small posters hanging above the aisles with cartoon bats and ridiculous slogans about “saving on your midnight cravings.” Someone has even put a black cape on the cardboard cutout near the entrance.

Leon doesn't seem impressed.

He walks past it with his cart, expression completely neutral, until an employee stops him near the checkout and smiles.

"Sir, since you're a vampire, you qualify for our special promotion."

Leon stops.

You can practically see him reconsidering every decision that led him into this store.

The employee hands him a coupon booklet decorated with tiny cartoon fangs. Leon looks down at it for several seconds before slowly looking back up.

"I appreciate the offer," he says, keeping his voice polite despite the obvious confusion on his face, "but I'm not sure why being a vampire qualifies me for a discount on laundry detergent and frozen vegetables."

The employee points toward the sign explaining the promotion.

Apparently, vampires receive ten percent off anything purchased after sunset.

Leon reads the sign carefully. Then he looks at you. "So they've decided my condition is a loyalty program."

You have to look away before he notices you laughing.

Leon sighs and folds the coupon booklet in half, tucking it into his coat pocket. "All right. Fine. Ten percent is ten percent. I'm not going to insult the discount just because the marketing department has questionable taste."

The problem is that the cashier recognizes him again.

When Leon reaches the register, the cashier smiles and asks whether he'd like the special vampire bag.

Leon looks toward the counter. It's a small black paper bag with cartoon fangs printed across it.

He stares at it.

Then he looks at the cashier with the exhausted patience of a man who has dealt with much worse things than this and somehow finds this considerably more irritating.

"I'll take the regular bag," he says calmly. "I've spent enough of my evening being reminded of what I am. I don't need my groceries dressed up for the occasion."

The cashier laughs apologetically and starts packing everything normally.

Leon reaches for his wallet, but before he can pay, the cashier notices something on the receipt and brightens.

"Actually, sir, you also get a free item."

Leon pauses.

"What kind of item?"

The cashier points toward a display near the entrance. It's a tiny plush bat.

Leon looks at it. Then at you. Then back at the bat.

Finally, he takes it from the cashier with the same reluctant seriousness he would use to accept something genuinely important.

"I suppose we can't leave it here now."

He places the little bat carefully in the grocery bag. Leon notices you looking at it and gives you a sideways glance.

"Don't start," he says, though there's already a faint trace of amusement in his expression. "I didn't ask for it, and I'm certainly not displaying it somewhere."

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