Chapter Text
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
— Requiem, Robert Louis Stevenson
If you had to point out the exact coordinate of the tectonic tension release that split your marriage in the middle, and answer — Was it a night of shouting that did it, fire in the throat, accusations hammered like nails into the cold silence that followed? Was it some apology gone wrong, or some confession, or one act that couldn’t be unwound?
No.
It was a kiss.
Or rather: the sudden bewildering lack of one.
It’s late, the digital display on the oven reads a quarter past two.
You are sitting at the kitchen island, cradling a mug of masala chai with a pale, crinkly skin formed over it, forearms planted in the scatter of unopened mail, your documents, and the laptop in front of you, navigating the insomnia that always accompanies the tail end of Leon’s deployments.
After this long of marriage to a man whose job title is a redacted line of black ink, you have developed a physiological clock entirely dictated by his proximity to home. Your body has learned to count distance in smaller things than miles: sleep thinning to gauze near the end of an assignment, the ache in your jaw going away only once his return has entered some system somewhere, finding yourself listening for engines long before dawn as if you could hear a government airfield from here.
Which is tonight, because a coded message pinged your phone three hours ago and your stomach cinched before you even read it. An automated DSO courtesy that translates simply to an incoming flight.
The phrasing is the same bloodless logistics language you spend your days swimming in, clipped and clean and scrubbed of a human being at the center of it. Inbound movement. Estimated arrival window. No promise beyond the fact that he made it onto the plane.
Well, the rituals of waiting are half the architecture of your relationship, anyway.
And also, so is watching the software some discreet guys have installed that is connected to his wedding ring that sends you his health data. A thumbnail worries the softened paper seam of a padded envelope until it starts to peel.
His stats are in the safe green zone.
That’s how you keep track of your husband while he’s away from home. You haven’t stopped monitoring the app, even after it was confirmed he would be back today.
Logically, it would be better if you also had it on your phone, but for your own mental wellbeing, you have learned to keep it within reach but not within sight, as if denying its presence will ward off the possibility getting a call about bad news.
Which, you have, in the past.
So, you cope how you can.
The dread at some point was a more constant companion than Leon. Hovering in the corner of your eye, right above your shoulder, disappearing whenever you tried to look at it. Always in the dark. Waiting. Waiting.
Telling you, any day now.
Any day, you would receive the news.
Any day, people from the DSO would knock on your door.
However.
That was then.
That raw nerve had long since scabbed over.
You’d trained the frantic over-imagining out of your system until you could sit through a hurricane of bad news with a straight face. You learned to weaponize patience the way your husband weaponized pistols. The part of you that used to stare holes through the phone has been smoothed down like river stones by years of release codes, custody logs, sealed transfers, and destination fields left blank above your pay grade.
And hey, there are things a body learns from the sheer force of repetition. How to wait without calling it waiting. How to leave a message unopened for two full minutes because opening it will not change its contents. How to breathe through the strange domestic vertigo of sipping tea on a Tuesday night while somewhere three time zones away, Leon is probably taking fire in a containment breach where the enemy deployment forms show a weapons-grade strain of the Tyrant-Virus — a strain you only recognize because you glimpsed the incident report in Sherry's inbox when you brought her lunch last week.
And in the center of this architecture of waiting sits a single, unwavering faith:
You built a life on the promise that Leon will always come back to you.
On taking him at his word.
Around letting that word be enough to get dinner made, to answer emails, to sign for packages, to go to work and process somebody else’s emergency pull without letting your mind peel away and trail after him.
There is no percentage in wondering if his face will be the same as it was when he left, or if the next time you see him the light will have drained a little further from his eyes, or if he’ll come back with an injury that will never quite heal, or if he’ll come back at all. You don’t conjure up the catastrophes that might have happened between the last call and now. You don’t re-read the old news articles about Harvardville, or Tall Oaks, Lanshiang, Raccoon City except for the anniversary, when the survivors’ forum organizes a memorial and Sherry sends out a mass email.
You are a student of self-preservation: you have archived the past but do not excavate it unless the need outweighs the cost.
The topography of this life has long since been mappable with your eyes closed. You know exactly how much slack to give him when he returns checked out. Exactly how to draw the humanity back into his eyes when it has gone somewhere far, far away to torment itself. You’re highly attuned to the barometric pressure of Leon’s pain. He brings it home as silence, if not, tetchy humor, or as a brief, naked need that is gone almost before you can respond.
But how he tries, your husband.
He tries so hard to leave the job at the door the way you do when he doesn’t have to — to be “the man you married” and not the one held back by what he keeps inside, he says, as if he’s a different man without it, as if his core personality and existence isn’t so intertwined with his past and path, as if you haven’t married him not despite all this, but because. And—
The metallic, stealthy slide of a key slipping into the deadbolt tinkles down the hall. You freeze.
Usually, there is a protocol to his arrival. Years ago, when the phantom pains of Raccoon City were still loud enough to make his hands jump at sudden noises, he established a rule. He never used his key to come through the front door if you were home. He would ring the bell or knock — a terrible mimicry of shave and a haircut — to announce his presence. It was a joke so you wouldn't pull the baseball bat from under the bed, but it was also a psychological threshold. You imagine being welcomed home with something with a heartbeat opening the door for him when it was usually him entering rooms with the expectation of exterminating threats that jumped at his face around every corner meant a lot to him.
You rise from your seat and leave the kitchen, rounding the corner just as the heavy oak door swings inward.
Leon stands in the threshold, bringing the chill of the late night with him.
Even exhausted, his presence is sheer gravity. Your absolute hunk of a man fills the doorway, tall and broad through the shoulders, wrapped in a heavy leather jacket that makes his already thick chest look impassable. He is in his late forties now, but time hasn't whittled him down; it has only made him denser, bigger and sturdier than he was in his youth. The hallway light catches the layers of his light brown hair, the long fringe already sweeping forward to obscure his pinched brow.
“Hello sailor,” you say softly, keeping the volume low to match the hour.
He kicks the door shut with the heel of his boot. “Hey.”
It’s rough, dragged through miles of fatigue. He looks worn, his crow’s feet carved a little deeper tonight, but his light blue eyes remain hawklike, tracking the shadows of the foyer as if his attention refuses to power down.
You step forward, propelled by the simple, blinding purity of relief: he is here, he is home again, back beneath your roof, the world outside briefly inconsequential. You brace for the usual — the thunderous sluice of his breath as the burdens he bore are at last surrendered, the faltering caving of his posture as gravity of you slowly reclaims him, and above all, the inevitability of his arms folding you in, tugging you as if to test the strength of your legs.
When you step into his space, his body reacts on pure instinct. His large hands catch you squarely by the waist, pressing familiarly into the soft fabric of your sweater. It is a possessive, grounding grip, the physical reality of a man who knows exactly how to hold his wife — not softened at all by boredom of the years that have gone by. Still the same enthusiasm and strength. Still the same longing.
Your hands come up to rest against his chest, feeling the solid heat radiating through the crispness of the night on his clothes, and you angle your chin upward, rising onto your toes to meet his mouth.
Leon pivots. Instead of his mouth, the rough, unshaven line of his jaw grazes your lips. You catch a fleeting, abrasive press of his cheek against yours before he is already pulling back, putting an extra inch of distance between your bodies.
Huh.
The rejection is so quiet, so neatly executed, that for a moment, you wonder if you imagined the slight. But your lips are still parted in the empty air, and his hands have already dropped from your waist.
“Don't,” he murmurs, his tone dropping into a low, deadpan register to pave over the awkwardness. “I'm a biohazard right now, baby.”
He steps out of the narrow space you share, rolling his shoulders as if shrugging off an invisible yoke. “Three different time zones of airplane grit, sweat, and a lot of shit that doesn't wash out easily. Let me hose off before I make you regret standing downwind.”
He aims for casual, a quick one-liner deployed like a smoke grenade to cover his retreat. His go-to move. But you've been married to him long enough to clock what he's not doing. Like meeting your eyes.
“I've seen you worse,” you reply, keeping it light, a perfect volley back. “Remember that time in '15? I'm pretty sure you had actual bog water in your hair. Your threshold for 'contamination' is conveniently flexible.”
“That was one time.” He almost sounds offended.
“You smelled like a swamp creature for three days.”
“And you still let me sleep in the bed. Which, in retrospect, says more about your standards than mine.” Leon's mouth twitches into a smirk, but it's performative. His eyes stay distant, that pale blue gone somewhere you can't reach. “Give me ten minutes.”
He shrugs off the heavy leather jacket. Rather than tossing it over the brass hook by the door as he has done a thousand times before, he holds it out like a white flag. When you reach for it, the transaction feels strange, a physical object placed between you to ensure you don't attempt to step into his space again. He leaves the garment in your hands, treating it like a barrier as he moves past you.
“Be right back,” he says with an almost apologetic pinch to your nose that you wave off, already walking away.
You watch his broad back recede into the dim light of the corridor, listening to his heavy footfalls as the bathroom door clicks shut behind him, followed moments later by the hiss of the shower turning on.
You are left standing entirely alone in the foyer, holding his jacket like a prop from a play.
The bare bones of this retreat is a parallel to another homecoming — one that plays out in the theater of your mind now with such clarity it feels as though the years have not passed, or have simply looped.
You can't recall the year exactly. You remember the season, woodsmoke, damp pavement and wet leaves of late autumn; and you remember that you'd been asleep on the couch with the television murmuring its way through some late-night rerun. A blanket pools around your hips, a paperback splayed open on your chest, its spine cracked.
You don't hear the car pulling up to the driveway with such hasty parking that you would later discover must have been loud as hell from the brake marks on the ground — let alone hear the keys and the door getting unlocked. It's the uncanny feeling of being watched that jostles you from that state of half-sleep. When your eyelids flicker, there's a figure at the edge of the room. A shadow in the shape of a person, filling the frame of the entryway like a boogeyman. For a second, in the haze of slumber, your heart misses a couple beats. Your muscles tense in preparation to roll, to spring up and defend yourself, to grab the nearest thing you could throw, because surely an intruder couldn't be that bold, to waltz in, to stand and observe—
The TV illuminates the dark room.
“Ah, fuck! Leon! You scared the living daylights out of m—”
You have only a couple seconds to take in the state he's in — tactical vest still strapped across his chest, boots still laced and caked with a substance you didn't look at long enough to identify, sidearm holstered but jacket gone, the dark long-sleeve beneath stiff in and tones darker places, the fabric holding shapes it shouldn't, the blood on his face; and you barely make it upright before he crosses the room. Two strides, maybe three, and then Leon hits the hardwood floor with a bone-jarring impact that rocks the ground underneath and makes you jump.
He collapses forward, dragging his heavy torso down until his forehead finds the soft terrain of your lap. His massive arms wrap around your waist, his grip locking with a desperate, crushing intensity, burying his face into the fabric of your pajama bottoms.
Your heart stutters and shoots up, a frantic bird battering against your throat. “Leon?” you whisper, your hands automatically flying to his hair, burying your fingers into the long, sweat-dampened strands at the nape of his neck. “Leon, hey, what is it? Are you hurt?”
He shakes his head, the movement infinitesimal against your thighs. He just grips you tighter, his broad shoulders tense under the dense layers of Kevlar and black canvas.
“Let me look at you,” you urge, pressing your palms against his rigid shoulders, trying to coax him up. “Come on baby, look up. Let me see your face.”
“No,” he rasps, muffled, torn at the edges. “Don't look at me. Not right now.”
“You're covered in blood—”
“It isn't mine,” he says, the bleakness in his voice effectively stopping the breath in your throat. He exhales a long, ragged sound, his face pressing deeper into you, as if trying to physically merge his existence with yours, to hide from the ghosts at his heels. “Just let me stay right here. Give me a minute. Please.”
“…Okay.” Your fingers weave back into his hair, stroking along the length of his scalp. “I'm right here. I've got you. I've got you, Leon.”
His broad frame shudders, his chest expanding and contracting in a series of violent spasms. You can feel his shoulders quaking beneath your touch, his body shaking with the strain of containing a grief so immense, it is like the ocean itself has poured its way inside of him.
“It's okay,” you murmur, continuing the soothing motions of your hand. “It's going to be okay.”
Leon shakes his head again, and it kills you. You do not push him again. You yield, soften the lines of your posture, curving over him to drape your body over his shuddering frame. You stroke the side of his head, your nails lightly dragging against his scalp in a grounding pattern. You murmur mindless, soothing things — that he is safe, that you are here, that you will not leave his side, and everything is going to be all right.
You know, of course, that these are lies.
You know that this is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the job will drag him through a new layer of hell, that the horrors he has witnessed today will not be the final nightmare of his career.
You know that the world outside the walls of your home is a cruel and vicious one, and that no amount of promises or wishes or luck will keep him from returning to the frontlines.
You know, and yet you whisper the words anyway, hoping they might carry enough conviction to become truth. Hoping that even a single lie, spun with love, if only for a moment in time, may offer shelter from the storm of his life.
The TV's glow pulses silently across the walls, casting shifting rectangles of light that dance with the shadows, and outside, headlights from a passing car sweep through the window, spotlighting your huddled forms for a brief moment before plunging you back into half-lit darkness. The light catches the damp strands of Leon's hair and the pallor of his scratched and cut, bare forearms where he clings to you.
Slowly, the frantic tension seeping from his muscles begins to ebb. His breathing shifts from ragged, defensive pulls of air to one longer and deeper. And when he finally speaks, his voice is a gravelly croak vibrating against your knee.
“I kept thinking about you.”
Oh, Leon.
“Comms went completely dark,” he whispers, the fragmented confession falling from his lips, bloodied pieces of broken glass. “Lost the extract point. Had to hike twelve miles through the quarantine zone. Kept thinking about this god-awful mustard velvet. How you refused to return it, so I refused to pay for the moving and carried it myself and got scrapes on the foorframe. Kept thinking about you being so mad you slept out here on a couch I told you would ruin my back... and then I found out you were right. It's comfortable.”
You let your thumb trace the rough cartilage of his ear.
“Every time it got — when it got bad, I just. Kept putting you in front of it. Like if I could get back to you, the rest of it didn't count.”
Your throat aches. You press your mouth to the crown of his head, breathing in the smell of smoke and copper, and say the only thing that matters.
“You're here.”
“Yeah.”
“And I'm here.”
His fingers curl deeper into the fabric at your back. “Yeah.”
“So the rest of it doesn't count.”
A tremulous smile curves against the surface of your thigh, the faintest hint of brightness in the dark of the room. “Yeah...” He squeezes you closer.
“And Leon?”
“Hm?”
“It’s marigold chenile.”
That gets a loud snort from him.
You cradle his jaw between your palms. Your thumbs stroke the curve of his cheekbone, and you lean in, pressing a kiss against his grime-caked temple. “C'mon, let's get cleaned up.”
Leon's eyes flutter shut. “I can't move.”
“Sure you can.” You give his shoulder a gentle pat. “Come on, big guy, up and at 'em. I'll wash your hair and help peel you out of the rest of that stuff, and then we'll order a pizza, and not think about that beast of a report waiting for you tomorrow.”
That earns you a dry chuckle, and he lets himself be guided to his feet and steered towards the bathroom.
Weeks later, on a Saturday with no particular agenda, you find a painting at an estate sale two towns over. A lighthouse — oil on canvas, small enough to carry under one arm, rendered in muted blues and grays with a single warm beam cutting through fog. It's not expensive or remarkable. But the relentlessness of the light in it reaching forward into the dark of a storm churning the sea stops you, a fixed point doing its work without any guarantee that it will help anyone.
You hang it in the hallway, between the coat closet and the kitchen door, where it would be the first thing visible from the entryway.
Leon notices it that evening. He was heading to the kitchen, half-distracted, and then he stops. Just stops, one hand still on the wall, his eyes on the painting. He doesn't say anything for a long moment. You watch from the living room doorway as his expression changed phases — recognition, maybe, or gratitude, or the particular ache of being understood in a way he hadn't asked for.
“Where'd you find this?”
“Estate sale. Twelve dollars.”
“Twelve dollars,” he repeats, like the mundanity of it makes it better. He looks at it a while longer, then looks at you.
“It's perfect,” he says. And means it.
The painting has stayed in that precise spot on the wall for years now, its muted colors doing their slow work of settling into the house as a piece of furniture you no longer consciously notice. You vacuum around it, dust it when the mood strikes, occasionally pause to appreciate the artist’s work.
On certain nights, you'll find him there, too.
Not always. Sometimes weeks will pass without mention of the lighthouse at all. But there are nights when you'll wake to find him standing in the hallway, shirtless in the dim glow of the nightlight, his scarred broad back and shoulders catching the faint illumination as he studies the painting. He won't be doing anything but standing there, his arms crossed, his attention fixed on the canvas with the daze that only comes from deep exhaustion. Those are the nights when whatever lurks behind the doors he so meticulously closes behind him at work manages to trail him home, and in response, you silently slip away, granting him the solitude he needs.
Other times it's mornings, before the sun has properly risen, when the kitchen is still dark and you're padding out for coffee. He'll already be there, leaning against the opposite wall as if he's been waiting for the house to wake up around him. He'll catch your eye first, or you'll catch his, and the bunching thing his face makes is an emotion you've never fully learned to name — not quite sadness, not quite nostalgia, but the exact shade of blue you imagine long-distance sailors must feel when they finally spot shore after too many nights of black water. He'll just look at it, at that beam cutting through the dark and the storm, and then at you, and his posture will ease by fractions, enough that you know whatever knot was twisting inside him has loosened just enough to breathe around.
You don't ask what he's thinking when he stands there. You've learned that some thoughts are meant to be left alone, like birds that won't sing if they know they're being watched.
The wall around the painting hasn't stayed bare for long, however. A life seeps into the empty spaces, one object at a time, relocated from other places or newly added. There's the photo from that trip to the Mediterranean region of Turkiye, the two of you squinting into the sunset, colors bleeding together at the edges. You remember how the salt had dried in your hair and how Leon's sunglasses had left an indentation on the bridge of his nose when he finally took them off. Tucked into a corner of the frame, there's a creased ticket stub from that surprise concert you'd driven six hours to see, the ink on the venue name barely legible anymore from how often you've both run your thumb over it. A collection of postcards from the places he's sent them from — countries you can't always pronounce, messages that say nothing at all about what he was really doing there — arranged in a haphazard semicircle around the lighthouse. Pressed leaves from hikes, coasters from bars where you'd stolen quiet moments before another deployment, the brittle petals of a dried rose from an anniversary when you weren't sure he'd make it home in time.
Faces, too — photos that capture a geography of people. There's Sherry at your elbow, grinning widely at some DSO summer cookout where the burgers were charcoal-black and Leon pretended to be offended when she ate his last one. Chris, looking distinctly uncomfortable in civilian clothes at Rebecca's wedding, his massive shoulders straining at the seams of a dress shirt that clearly hadn't been worn since his sister's graduation. Claire appears twice — once smirking behind bar napkins scrawled with inside jokes from that night in Baltimore, and again, softer, in a candid shot Leon caught while you were whispering in her ear. In one frame from years back, Helena leans conspiratorially close during a rare night out, her laugh caught mid-motion, while in another, Hunnigan adjusts her glasses during an outdoor briefing where you'd brought sandwiches. Jill appears near the bottom, a rare casual moment where she's actually unguarded, caught during that brief window she and Chris stayed with you after Valentine's Day when their apartment was flooding. A cluster of DSO agents whose names blur together but whose hands you shook at countless retirements and memorial services. It's all pinned up there, a story told in fragments, evidence of the inches between who he is when he leaves and who he is when he returns.
The jacket hangs heavy in your hands, reeking of the same sterile-metal scent that clings to him after these particular kinds of missions and still breathing the chilly air he brought inside. You move to the brass hook by the door and drape the leather carefully, your fingers working the sleeves into neat lines.
With how he acted just now, you know he'll be back before the painting after you go to bed, whether he seeks it out on his own or stops on his way to the kitchen for a drink while you're pretending to be asleep.
It is the morning after his return, the sun burning away the last remnants of the night shift you spent waiting for him, but the light bouncing off the bathroom tiles is weirdly exposing.
You stand alone at the vanity, fresh out the shower, drying your hair. The mirror is flecked with barely noticable toothpaste and soap residue, the kind of thing that gets ignored until 'company is coming', and the counter is cluttered with the products that keep the signs of time at bay.
The bags under your eyes could carry groceries from the lack of sleep you had from worrying about his silent state the entire night. The space beside you where he would occupy on the mornings he was home is a yawning void, the only sign he was ever here at all is the damp towel that belongs to him.
He had showered quickly, the sound of the water running was almost a white-noise in the background of your fitful restlessness, and was in the walk-in closet changing by the time you woke. The only acknowledgement you got was his back tensing in the reflection of his dresser's mirror, and a muttered, “Morning,” that could barely be considered a greeting, and definitely wasn't a proper welcoming of him returning alive from wherever the fuck the government sends him to do their dirty work.
He was out the door for a morning run before you could even get a foot on the floor, and the harsh clang of the lock clicking shut was louder than a giant gong in the silence of the house.
All you could do was slap your hands on your thighs in a gesture of bewilderment and snort out a, “Good morning to you too.”
And he hasn't knocked or rang the door this time around, as well. Just silently came back while you were moving through your morning routine in the bathroom, and began to put a pot on the stove.
Usually, he would have come to join you in the shower or the bath, or at the very least, sat on the toilet seat and spoke to you while you did your skincare and makeup, to give you a rundown on where the hell he was, and why the hell he wasn't telling you anything else, despite the fact that you had a level 4 clearance yourself. Now, though, you can hear him move around in the master bedroom. Opening the blinds, folding the clothes that were on the chair, making the bed. You can't see him, and he's not talking, but you know his little quirks and the order of operations he goes through to settle himself back into domesticity.
You cap your moisturizer, setting it down on the glass shelf with a click that sounds aggressively loud, gather your things, adjust the collar of your shirt and dust off the gathered powders, and step out of the bathroom, entering the narrow, neutral territory of the hallway.
The timing is flawless.
The exact moment your foot crosses the doorway, Leon suddenly rounds the corner from the bedroom. He slides past you, maintaining a precise distance of three feet, executing a maneuvering pivot that ensures your shoulders do not even brush.
“Hey,” he says, “I started chai for you, it's still boiling but milk is yet to be in. I'm gonna hop in the shower.”
“Oh, why didn't you come in while I was...”
But he is gone, the bathroom door closing firmly behind him.
Your hand wavers slightly in the air, reaching to grasp the words that died on your tongue. Your lips, parted, form a small circle of shock, a half-asked question that will never find its answer.
You knock twice. “Hey, Grumpatron 3000,” you say, trying to keep your tone light despite the weight of the worry in your gut, “Is everything okay? Don't leave me hanging here.”
He had started the chai for you, though. That's gotta mean something. Doesn't it?
“Uh, yeah,” comes from the other side of the door, the word stretched long like taffy, and you can just feel the awkwardness in his voice, like he doesn't want to have a conversation right now. Or maybe that's just you projecting.
“Right,” you say, leaning your forehead against the cool wood, “Just trying to figure out if I should clear the coffee table so the paramedics have a place to put their kit.”
“No, I'm fine. Sorry for making you worry. But I'm good, no need to pull a Ripley's Believe It or Not.”
Okay, he's joking around.
“Right. Because that's not famous last words or anything.”
“I'm not that decrepit yet, for God's sake.”
“Someone is getting close enough to join AARP...”
“I don't even a silver streak in my hair. Now go and check on your chai before you blame me for it being bitter.”
You can't help but think back to how mornings with him usually go.
Standing at the double vanity in the master bathroom shoulder to shoulder, brushing your teeth in tandem, little fights of elbows and hip-checks because of how both of you gravitate towards the same half of the mirror despite all the room, the complaining that follows afterwards with no attempt made to remedy the situation, and flicked foam. Him shaving his perpetual five-o'clock shadow, yapping that the razor you bought him was too fancy, and the one time he cut his chin because he refused to use the fancy pre-shave oil and instead kept using the cheap, shitty, generic brand, foamy canned crap that smelled like the type of men that hunted the most dangerous game. Which is women, obviously. You blow-drying your hair, the heat warming his back, the noise drowning out whatever inane comments he has to make about the latest news from the TV in the shared bedroom. Him doing his skin care routine, the whole nine yards with your bubble headband and everything, that you taught him and now does better than you, his face shiny and glowing, while you're over there with a crusty, bare, sun damaged, dehydrated mess. Then the two of you migrating to the closet, the dressing area, to pick out clothes and accessories and to argue over who left a wet towel on the ottoman. And the little touches that were given in between, the ones that said 'I'm here,' 'you're good,' and 'I love you' without the actual words, the ones that meant the most, the ones that had been taken for granted, the ones that are missed.
All of that is missing from this morning.
And the next.
And the one after that.
Here is the mathematics of your marriage: you work with parsing the changing equations of his trauma, to solve for the variable of his comfort, even when the sum keeps coming up zero. To let him control the contact, to accept the strange arithmetic of space he imposes when he returns. Sometimes that means reconciling yourself to nights where his warmth is a phantom limb beside you. Understanding that a kiss avoided is not rejection but quarantine, a different kind of protection. Learning to mind your own business. That's the price of admission to this life, isn't it? The silent tax you pay for the privilege of still having him to pay it to.
Because waiting for your husband to come back home doesn't just involve physical distances. It's also the emotional miles he travels, and trusting him to return, as well.
His broad back blocks most of the mirror, the heavy, layered musculature of his shoulders bunching as he leans over the basin. He holds his straight razor under the cascading water. Steam is visibly rising from the tap, billowing up to fog the lower hemisphere of the glass. The temperature has to be scalding, yet he holds his hands directly in the stream, his thick fingers turning a flushed, raw red under the punishment.
“You're going to boil your own hands off,” you say softly, announcing your presence so you don't startle him.
“Can't be too careful these days,” he says, his voice a low, raspy rumble over the noise of the rushing water. He twists the faucet off, and the sudden absence of the roar leaves a ringing void in the room. “Place is probably a petri dish.”
He reaches for a pristine white washcloth, not the damp blue one he usually leaves wadded up on the counter. He grips it tightly, wiping down the edges of the sink, catching the faint streaks of water and shaving foam, then wipes the basin in perfect, overlapping concentric circles.
“Since when are you worried about that? You used to eat protein bars sitting at the bottom of a tactical go-bag for three years. I once watched you drink from a garden hose behind a gas station.”
He only scoffs in return.
It's a random day. Leon is taking out the trash.
This is not remarkable in itself. Less remarkable is why it's happening at almost midnight — the bag is barely half-full, a wasteland of milk cartons and a few takeout containers from the past two days left to fester because you've both been too exhausted to deal with them properly. What catches your attention is the ceremony of it. He's acting like he's disposing of hazardous materials instead of household waste.
You're hovering around the kitchen entryway, shoulder propped against the cool plaster of the wall, watching him work in the island of light cast by the range hood. Leon has always been methodical about certain things — gun cleaning, tactical packing, and surprisingly, keeping the garage organized with all those gleaming toys you never quite understood — but this is meticulous to the point of obsession.
He pulls the drawstring tight, twice where once would suffice, tying it with extra knots. Then he reaches into the cabinet below the sink for a new liner, wrapping it around the plastic bin, pressing and tucking until every edge is secured, leaving no loose flap that might catch air or spill unseen contents.
The whole process takes maybe ninety seconds. He doesn't hum along to the music on the wired headphones he normally puts in to avoid disturbing you when he's puttering around the kitchen after midnight. They aren't even on. No podcasts, either. He's somewhat of a bomb disposal expert surveying a ticking time bomb while you're standing there with all the subtlety of a neon sign.
Leon lifts the bag from the can and steps back, his posture stiff as he examines his work, checking that no breach has occurred. Only then does he turn toward the back door, the black plastic bag held away from his body like it's radioactive, walking through the kitchen without acknowledging you, the sweep of the range hood light catching the silver glint of his wedding band as he passes in and out of the illuminated zone.
You keep waiting in the doorway, listening to the scrape of the back door, the heavy thud of the trash landing in the outdoor bin, and then the scrape again as the door slides shut. When he returns, he washes his hands at the sink. Twice. Scrubbing between each finger with a thoroughness that extends beyond mere hygiene, his back still turned to you, his focus entirely on the basin in front of him.
He reaches for a towel — disposable, not the communal dishcloth that usually hangs from the oven handle — dries his hands, then tosses it directly into the garbage can he just lined. A fresh bag already containing its first piece of trash.
“If you brought a murder weapon or some damning evidence with DNA or something, I can help you properly dispose of them,” you say, breaking the silence. “Right outside of home isn't the best place, just saying. I watch a lot of Forensic Files.”
“Very funny,” Leon replies, turning to face you, the kitchen island a barrier between you, his eyebrows lifting in a half-ironic arch. “What gave me away? Was it the latex gloves and hazmat suit?”
“I'd say the the surgical hand scrubbing. But seriously, what's up with the covert trash operation?”
“The smell,” he says.
“Oh,” you reply, not knowing what else to say. You can't really argue with that. The windows are open, it’s late August in D.C.. Not a good environment to ferment scraps. “Yeah. Yeah, fair enough. I guess we've neglected the domestic chores lately. I had three equipment manifests to reconcile from that New Mexico field op, and one of the restricted-issue cases came back with a contamination flag on the seal. Spent half the day arguing with Inventory about their tracking system when clearly their dumbasses in receiving didn't log the biohazard protocol properly.”
“All I'm hearing is you didn't stop by to eat at all,” Leon remarks, the dry humor of his delivery masking a genuine concern.
He knows how you get. Work mode activated means the world falls away. Once you start on a project, you tend to become single-minded. Food, sleep, and socializing can fall victim to your tunnel vision.
“C'mon, have a late dinner. Or an extremely early breakfast. Take a break. You're gonna drive yourself to an ulcer at this rate. We've got leftovers. Those weird dumplings. Supposed to be like a Russian pierogi, or whatever, but actually taste like a soggy samosa with too much filling. Surprisingly not bad if you dip them in sour cream.”
“You mean pelmeni?” you ask, raising an eyebrow. “I thought you didn't like them.”
“Yeah, that's the thing. I didn't. But they're kind of growing on me.”
“They’re growing on you now? Boy, I’ve been telling you to eat them properly for years—”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“But noo, you never listen to me. You do this every time. Every time. Like I tell you to hey, fish is good with lemon and you say nah, and I’m annoyed the entire dinner and suddenly one day, Mr. Kennedy has discovered lemon is good with fish and is a fan of it! I’ve been telling you!!”
He looks sick of your shit. “Can a man not go at his own pace?”
“Can a man not be allergic to advice when his wife knows what he’ll like?”
“I thought you liked your man standing his ground.”
“I would like my man to take pelmeni out already, please.”
Leon shrugs, opening the fridge and taking out the container in question. “You sit, I'll heat them up. Maybe add a little something to dress them up. Actually, we have a bit of borscht left too...”
“Sure,” you agree. You are hungry, now that the adrenaline rush from the inventory fiasco has faded. “But no more of that cheap beer for today for me. Let's try that fancy IPA you've been saving. I think we've earned the right to indulge a little tonight.”
“Atta girl. Knew there was a reason I married you,” he teases as he sets the food to reheat and retrieves the bottles from the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.
“Shut up.”
He holds one bottle steady, then uses the edge of its cap to hook the lip of yours and pop it open with a decisive twist of his wrist. The hiss of escaping carbonation cuts through the quiet kitchen. He makes yours slide to you first before taking his own bottle and opening it bare-handed, the cap coming off with a low grunt of effort as his knuckles whiten with the strain.
“Oh Wesley I'm dripping,” you say as you watch the flex of his forearm, and he gives an incredulous, huffed laugh at the abruptness.
(He'd blinked and immediately asked who 'Wesley' was when you'd first said it, that deep line appearing between his eyebrows, the one that meant he was trying to parse your life's latest pop-culture reference bridge. Half the evening was spent you projecting your phone’s screen on the massive TV in the living, scrolling through TikTok to make him understand the punchline — and it was the most puzzling thing to him ever what was so funny about this.)
“Don't objectify me,” he says, his tone droll, a smile threatening to break the flat line of his mouth. “I'm not just a piece of meat to you, am I?”
You grin at him. Then, leaning across the island, you tap the neck of his bottle against his in a casual toast. “Of course not. You're also a pain in my ass.”
You clink the bottles together gently before taking a long, appreciative sip, face souring at the hoppy bitterness on your tongue.
“I do work hard at that.”
“Work harder at making me happy,” you tease, and the smile breaks through. “Feed me, Seymour!”
“See, that's a reference I get.”
You notice an anomaly one random day.
On his nightstand — on Leon's side of the bed, where there is usually a book he isn't reading and the charging cable for his phone and a half-empty glass of water — there is now a small bottle. Compact, pharmaceutical-looking, the pump dispenser clean and unused-looking in the way of things recently purchased. Medical-grade hand sanitizer, the label says, in small, matter-of-fact font. 70% isopropyl alcohol.
You'd stood there for a moment in the morning light, and had thought, distantly and charitably, that it might be for the rash he developed on his forearm a week ago, or that perhaps the last mission involved something so disgusting it had instilled a brief germaphobia in him.
You'd checked his arm that morning. Faint, silvery striations cross-hatched its skin, running from his elbow to the knob of his wrist, up to the back of his hand, left behind from the rashes that had appeared so suddenly and disappeared just as fast. It hadn't been a bad rash, nothing requiring medical attention. Just some raised, red bumps. As though he'd rolled around in poison ivy, or come into contact with a strong allergen.
He'd theorized it was the hotel detergent, which was a perfectly plausible explanation, and since the rash had gone away quickly, the two of you hadn't paid too much attention to the leftover marks.
Apparently, Medical Countermeasure had taken a look at him and given him the clear. He'd complained that the ointments were greasy and made him sweat. A pain to apply and keep from getting on everything. The itch had stopped, anyway, which was the worst of it.
“You're lucky I love you and would kiss you no matter how blotchy you are,” you'd said, and kissed his nose, and he'd grumbled, embarrassed, that the marks would fade and you didn't have to worry, if it got any worse, he'd go get himself looked at. You were a nag, he loved you, and the next time, he'd make sure the hotel knew to use a different laundry soap on the sheets.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” you'd told him. The conversation ended there.
That night, when you're putting away the dishes after dinner, you see the bottle of disinfectant again, placed neatly on the kitchen counter. It seems he's taking real care that you don't catch it if it's contagious.
He eventually starts strictly separating his own laundry with the excuse that it will be better until he figures out what the rash is about.
You agree.
“What's with the turtlenecks? We just made it to September. Are you going through a Steve Jobs phase? Not complaining at all, I love the way it hugs your shoulders and arms. And the black looks nice.”
“I got banged up a bit, the bruises are nasty. Just don't wanna bring attention to them in public, y'know?”
“Okay...”
The guest bathroom is never anybody’s bathroom.
That is the joke of it.
It belongs to folded hand towels with the decorative stitching you only put out when company comes by, the ones that have survived three apartments and still smell faintly of the lavender sachet your mother insists on tucking into linen closets. There is a glass dish with two guest soaps in it, white and shell-shaped, both gone dusty around the ridges because nobody ever actually uses them. Extra rolls of toilet paper are stacked beneath the sink beside a travel bottle of ibuprofen, cotton pads in a half-open sleeve, and that little wicker basket you keep meaning to throw out because one handle has come loose and snags tights if you are careless. The framed print over the toilet has hung crooked for months. The night-light only works if you jiggle it. It is a room maintained for other people, for holidays and overnight visits and the idea that one day someone might need it. Not for either of you.
You notice because you are looking for the cold medicine.
Not for yourself. Mara from procurement came in glassy-eyed and stubborn that morning, wrapped in a cardigan and one of those oversized scarves that makes her look like she is trying to survive an arctic winter inside the office AC. She spent the better part of the morning insisting she is fine while blotting at her nose with scratchy brown paper towels from the break room dispenser. By eleven, she looked ready to fold face-first onto a spreadsheet. You told her to go home, but she dug her heels in. Back at your desk, an incoming chain about delayed protective gear requisitions sat open on your monitor while you thought about the half-full box of cold medicine at home.
So that is why you are on your knees in front of the guest bathroom cabinet during your lunchbreak on a Thursday, handbag tipped over on the tile beside you, blazer shrugged off and dropped over the closed toilet lid, rifling past extra soap, cotton swabs, hotel-size mouthwash, and a lint roller with somebody’s long blond hair caught around the adhesive.
You find the medicine behind a packet of disposable razors.
You pause with your hand still in the cabinet.
Disposable razors.
Leon does not use disposable razors.
He's used the same heavy one for years, stainless steel, could survive a fire, even. You bought this model for him years ago for his birthday, back when he was still using cheap disposable things despite the fat paycheck and shrugging off the razor burn, as if it made no sense to buy anything built to last when he spent so much of his life ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
He keeps spare blades in the drawer beside your sink because he is weirdly old-fashioned about some things and annoyingly smug about them too. Once stood there in a towel and informed you that cartridge razors were a scam built on planned obsolescence, face full of shaving cream, sounding like a man giving congressional testimony.
These are not his.
Or they should not be.
You pull the packet free.
One missing.
Your eyes go to the counter.
At first it is only the mouthwash. The bottle is blue instead of the green one you buy for guests twice a year and forget to replace. Then the hand towel hanging beside the sink: dark gray, thick cotton, the exact shade of the ones Leon prefers because they do not show stains. Then, in the ceramic dish by the faucet, a toothbrush.
Black.
His toothbrush is always black.
It sits in its place on your bathroom counter so often you barely see it anymore, only reach around it while hunting for your eyeliner or your tweezers or your face cream. You see it this morning in the holder beside yours. You are nearly sure of that. Enough that your chest tightens around the memory and squeezes.
You rise slowly, the packet of razors still in your hand.
The room looks different once you are standing.
Occupied in small, neat ways. A bottle of aftershave on the narrow shelf over the toilet. Not the full-size one from your bathroom, but the travel bottle he refills before trips. A comb beside it. Another antiseptic bottle. One of your hair ties looped around the faucet base, black elastic gone stretched at the seams. Folded on the rack below the sink, a towel that belongs to your master bath set.
You stare at it until you have to unclench your jaw.
The rash thing was fine, but. There isn’t a need to go this far.
Besides, why is he hiding these?
Leon notices things.
Comes with the job — field training, threat assessment, listenimg into the silence for what may be lurking in it — but he insists with you it’s different. An instinct that transcends training, as if love has mutated his threat radar.
Most days, this makes you feel chosen, mapped like a cherished terrain. On others, you resent how little of yourself you can keep unobserved. You’ve said so: “You’re not a bloodhound, mister, and I’m not a missing person.” To which he replied: “That’s the point.”
You learn this early in your marriage: you cannot exist in the same space with Leon S. Kennedy and expect him to miss something’s wrong. You cannot change the channel from the documentary about deep-sea creatures to a sitcom without him picking up that you specifically want laughter distract yourself. Cannot suddenly decide to use the good plates for leftover spaghetti on a Tuesday without him noticing you need some self-indulgence. Cannot, after months of letting dust accumulate under the bookshelf, suddenly scrub the baseboards clean while he's at work and expect him to return home oblivious to the change in the room's scent profile and clock that your mind is busy from that alone.
Most irritating is when you pick up a new book you've been meaning to read for weeks. You find a quiet corner in the house — the armchair by the window that gets the best afternoon light, the spot on the couch where the cushion has molded perfectly to your shape — and settle in with the paperback. And within minutes, he'll materialize in the doorway and stare for a while.
“Finished with Murakami already?” he'll ask, and it will sound like he's looking at you from the scope of a gun, magnifying and observing and pinpointing. Like he's got an eye on every thread in the sweater you're wearing and can tell which ones have moved between yesterday and today. (He had recommended the book, brought it home in the plastic bag of a bookstore in Alexandria, and handed it to you as if to say, “I saw this and thought of you.”)
That is to say, even when you try to be nonchalant about your findings on his stuff in the guest bathroom, Leon knows through the phone itself the moment you let it slip that you're in the middle of packing a care package for a sick coworker and couldn't find the tape for a good thirty minutes. It's usually him who's losing things and you who finds them, and he can hear that you're bothered that the roles are reversed.
“I haven't seen that roll in ages,” he tells you. “I've got a few spare in the garage if you don't mind masking tape.”
“I might just do that, actually. Would save me the trip to the store. I think the last time we needed clear tape was to ship that gift to Claire, and that was... in July?”
“You're doing a lot of mental math tonight,” he murmurs.
You ignore his attempt to metaphorically knock on your door to see if you'll answer. “Where in the garage are these rolls?”
“Top shelf in the back.” He takes a sip of whatever he's drinking. “Past the Harley, next to the Christmas decorations. Look left of where the toolbox is, there's a workbench near the SUV — scissors should be there.”
“Thank you, sweet boy,” you say, and the nickname slips out. You don't call him that a lot, not anymore at least, and the way he pauses to take a deep breath in before sighing lets you know that he's taken note of it. “What nice memory you have. Sometimes, I wish I had a quarter of that.”
“Get into crossword puzzles and sudoku.”
“Ugh, no. My brain cells deserve better.”
“Like a marathon of true crime documentaries, huh?”
“Exactly,” you reply, and then you go quiet because the truth is, you haven't been watching anything lately, not really.
The TV drones on in the corner of the living room, a box of light and sound that keeps the silence at bay but doesn't really fill anything. You could turn on the news, watch anchors with their professionally-constructed concern deliver statistics you can't retain, their faces blurring into the commercial for cleaning products that promise to eliminate 99.9% of germs. An hour later, you'd have no recollection of what was said, only a vague headache from the bright lights.
Same with the podcasts Leon leaves open on his phone, profiles of Cold War espionage networks, the unredacted histories of failed containment operations, forensic breakdowns of pandemic viral mutations, and interviews with retired agents from the Eighties who still won't go on the record. Same with the radio in the car on the way to work. They're on, but not in your head, washing over you like rain on a window, sliding down the glass without ever really penetrating. Your head is somewhere else entirely, stuck in a feedback loop of questions that sound like accusations in your own mind. An entire world marches on while you're standing still in the hallway of your home, staring at a lighthouse painting that suddenly looks less like art and more like a map where the X is buried.
It was already bad enough. Now, this guest bathroom situation...
“Hey. You got quiet all of a sudden. What's on your mind, angel?” Leon's voice crackles on the other end of the line.
There's a soft hum in the background, probably the engine of that ridiculous Porsche he justified as a midlife crisis purchase. The image clicks into place: him in the low-slung bucket seat, the leather creaking beneath his weight as he navigates some anonymous stretch of highway. His reflection in the rearview mirror, eyes on the road ahead, focused on the distance and the destination. The scenery changing outside the windows, the landscape shifting, the horizon receding. The miles adding up like a countdown, a reminder of how far away he is. The space between you growing, stretching, yawning.
Sometimes it feels like he's calling from another dimension entirely, some parallel world where touching his wife after carrying home god knows what on his skin is somehow more dangerous than facing down a B.O.W. with a handgun and a bad attitude. A different frequency, one you keep trying to tune into but only comes through as static. Where the logic of love and protection has been twisted — where the urge to keep you safe manifests as a slow, systematic withdrawal that feels an awful lot like abandonment. Where the force that binds you as husband and wife is also the one prying you apart.
“Come on, talk to me.”
“No, it's fine, it's stupid.” You cave in at how soft he said it, with the bare minimum of resistance. “I just miss you.”
Leon knows that small sentence is a loaded gun. Also knows the safety is on and it's not even aimed at him at all.
That's why there's a care package for you waiting on the porch after you get back home the very same day, having made it back to the DSO headquarters in the nick of time before lunchbreak ended and delivered the one you prepared to poor Mara who wasn't even able to make a quick trip to the store to get cold meds.
That basket on your porch is an inventory of conversations you barely remember having. The lavender-vanilla candle you mentioned smelling in a boutique window three weeks ago while on a lunch run sits wrapped in tissue paper beside your favorite brand of fuzzy socks — the ones with the little rubber grips on the bottom that make you feel like a contended cat stalking around on hardwood floors.
There's the artisanal chocolates with different fillings from that shop in Old Town you'd texted him about after your coworker brought some to the office. Even that Guerlain perfume sample you'd mentioned how divine it smelled when testing fragrances at Nordstrom half a year ago is there, unopened, still sealed in its little white envelope.
There's a new Kindle, the latest model with the warm backlight you'd been coveting but couldn't justify, pre-loaded with a mix of romance and thriller novels you'd bookmarked on your Amazon wishlist.
A bottle of that Lagavulin 16-year-old single malt you'd jokingly told Leon was “too good to waste” on anyone but him when he'd offered you a sip, now sits beside a set of handmade whiskey stones carved from soapstone.
Tucked beneath these items is a silk eye mask from Slip and a pair of cashmere lounge pants in that charcoal gray you love but could never bring yourself to spend the money on.
There's that limited edition fragrance you'd been admiring at Creed, the one with the notes of sandalwood and bergamot that made you linger at the counter longer than you should have. And next to it, a certificate for a spa day at that exclusive place you'd once said only existed for people who “have nothing better to do with their money than to be pampered.”
A pair of noise-cancelling headphones, the expensive over-ear ones from Bose, are nestled beside a collection of vinyl records from bands whose tours you'd lamented missing in your youth — who knew he'd been paying attention when you'd lamented missing them?
At the very bottom, beneath everything else, is a handcrafted ceramic mug with the lighthouse design you'd admired online months ago but never bought for yourself, its glaze catching the porch light like a beacon. And nestled inside the mug is a small folded note printed on cardstock:
> Hope this makes the days a little easier. Text me whenever you can. Love, L.
You don't know who he called to get this assembled in such short notice, to pull together this collection of things you barely remember mentioning, scattered across months and years. The logistics alone is a nightmare for a single trip: a stop for the Guerlain at Pentagon City, the spa gift certificate procured through whatever exclusive concierge service wealthy people use when they don't want to stand in line, the records tracked down in dusty shops along U Street where they probably still play vinyl on proper turntables behind the counter. The efficiency makes you stare off into the distance. How easily he exists in two separate worlds, one where he's your husband listening to you babble about perfume and scented candles, and another where he manipulates strings you can't even see to make these things appear on your doorstep without you ever knowing.
You stand there on the porch, the basket heavy in your arms, and wonder if it's meant to be compensation or consolation. If each item was chosen as a balm for the absence and isolation, or merely a reminder that he's thinking of you, even when his thoughts are a mystery. It's thoughtful and overwhelming, a gesture so intimate it could be an apology, or perhaps a plea.
The ghost of his cologne lingers in the fabric of the gift wrap. Leon's not a man of grand declarations, not the kind to write sonnets or compose songs, but his language is clear: I hear you, I see you, I haven't forgotten. But underneath that, there's a subtext that stings: This is all I can give right now. Forgive me.
The leaves thin early this year, drifting down into the gutters and sticking to windshields, and you’re just standing there one day at your window, watching them tumble from a half-dead maple on the curb, when it finally dawns on you.
The Raccoon City’s anniversary is getting closer.
It’s as if your subconscious had been politely clearing its throat all week, waiting for you to notice that his odd little rituals, his surges of energy and sudden withdrawals were lines drawn in highlighter, blinking neon reminders of what time of year it was.
You feel a brief, hot humiliation that it took you this long to remember — worse, that the penny had to drop in the first place.
You’d prided yourself on being the one person who never forgot what happened to him, on being the custodian of that particular wound. You’d promised yourself never to be the kind of spouse who tiptoed around the crater and offered up platitudes instead of help. But here you are, stunned to realize that you hadn’t even noticed that it was the middle of September.
You’d read somewhere, years ago, that trauma anniversaries affect the amygdala the way allergies affect sinuses: you might not see the pollen, but your body knows it’s there. That’s why he’d been wanting to sleep in his own bedroom for a while, why he’s been bringing out an alcohol flask out more to pour into his coffee, why he’d scrub his hands so hard the knuckles bled if you didn’t intercept him with lotion. It all makes sense, cruelly and completely.
But the shame is yours to chew, and you do, letting it grind your molars.
In your “defense,” a rationale exists for your oversight.
Septembers always sieves the color out of him, but the ones where he would avoid life itself like the plague and disappear off the face of the earth, where he would act like you were a complete stranger he couldn't even stand the slightest touch from, a dog too sick to even try and eat its favorite food, are long behind you. Things have been significantly better after the New York bioterrorist attack a decade ago. Chris had shaken Leon out like a dusty rug and beaten him against a porch railing until most of the ghosts fell out, and he was finally light enough to able to get back on his feet, pick his life back up, get some help. He’d managed to gain back your trust, and in return, you'd gotten complacent enough not to look for shipwrecks in the horizon around this time of year anymore.
You’d gotten so good at screening out triggers from your lives that the act itself became invisible, second nature. Maybe that’s why it snuck up on you. Maybe he wasn’t the only one whose brain was trying to keep you safe from memories that wanted to eat you alive.
However.
Yeah, however.
It still isn’t excusable, how you just fucking forgot.
You can sit down and sift through memories as though looking for a lost key at the bottom of a handbag all day, but that's not going to change the fact that you've been fumbling as if it's your first year with him all over again.
But it's also a concrete answer you're glad to have that you weren't just having a nebulous feeling that he was pulling away. When there's an answer, there can be an attempt at a solution, and that's more comforting than the alternative.
So, you start rearranging yourself around it, and stop taking the small liberties of marriage.
When Leon leaves his coffee by the stove and turns his back to crack eggs into the pan, you leave the mug alone instead of stealing a sip just to hear him complain that you always go for the first half-inch when it’s still hot. When he shaves, you stop perching on the bathroom counter with one foot hooked against the cabinet handle (because that too is one of those easy, everyday invasions that only works when he’s loose enough to be annoyed by you), reading him pieces of the paper over his shoulder while he squints at himself in the mirror and tells you, around a mouth full of foam, that sports journalism is the last honest profession in America. Even the paper itself you start handling differently. The sports section still ends up crumpled where he folds it wrong over the baseball scores, but the city pullout disappears before breakfast now, since every local editor in the country starts thinking they invented grief the minute the date gets close.
He notices the missing section on the second morning.
“There was more paper than this.”
You keep your eyes on the toaster. “I threw it out.”
The pause behind you is small. You know the sound his wedding band makes when he taps it against ceramic, and you hear it then, once, against the side of his mug.
“Oh.”
“They were already doing anniversary coverage.”
Another beat. “...Really.”
Maybe he’s deliberately making it sound like he didn’t even know. You turn around.
He’s standing barefoot on the cold tile in gray sweatpants that hang low on his hips and the old sweatshirt he refuses to throw out even though it's a few sizes small for him now, and pulls taut across the breadth of his shoulders and strains against the swell of his biceps. His hair is still damp at the nape from the shower. He has his coffee in one hand and the surviving half of the paper in the other, looking at you with that shuttered, careful face that makes you feel as if you’ve walked in on him bleeding and embarrassed him by seeing it.
“You don’t need to read that stuff,” you say, gentler than you meant to.
His eyes drop, though not in the way they used to years ago. Lower. To your mouth for a flicker, then to the toast you’ve just set on his plate.
“You don’t need to do all this either.”
You force a little shrug. “What do you mean? It's just breakfast.”
Leon gives that tiny nod of his, the one that never tells you whether he’s accepting what you said or choosing not to challenge it.
That would almost be enough on its own. Then Sherry sends the annual text, your phone lighting up against the counter's laminate.
Memorial at seven on the 30th. Forum meetup after, same place as last year. Tell me either way so I can save seats.
You don’t answer right away. Leon is at the sink beside you, rinsing the same mug longer than necessary, thumb dragged hard over the glaze as though soap is something that needs soaking into the ceramic. He catches the change in your face before you even say anything. He always does.
“Who is it?”
“Sherry.”
His hand stills under the running water.
You angle the screen toward him. He leans in and reads it from where he stands, shoulders going tight under the thin cotton of the sweatshirt. The faucet keeps running until you reach past him and shut it off yourself.
“You don’t have to go,” you say.
That gets you a look, startled, almost. As if he hadn’t realized you’d built the whole answer already and moved into it.
“I wasn’t going to, I have those investigation files to look into.”
“Then we don’t.”
He dries his hands with the dish towel, very slowly, fingers one by one. “You can go.”
“I’m not leaving you alone that night.”
He turns away before you can read his face properly and hangs the towel back on the oven handle with absurd care, squaring the corners.
“You don’t have to babysit me, y'know. I'm a big boy.”
Your fingers hook around the elastic band of his sweatpants and give them a firm tug, pulling him just a step closer. “Well, maybe I wanna spend time with that big boy, ever thought of that?” you tease, and that earns you a small laugh, a bit of a smile that gets the lines around his eyes to be more prominent, and a squeeze on your arm. A good sign, a great one. “I'll let Sherry know.”
His body is drawn toward you in the old familiar way — eyes softening, thumb finding that particular spot on your hip, the way his breath catches just before he leans in. You read it all as clearly as words on a page and brace yourself for the contact you've been starved of for weeks. For a half-second, his gaze drops to your mouth and you think this time, finally, this time he won't pull away. But then his fingers tighten around your waist in a way that feels more like apology than passion, and his head turns at the last moment. His lips press against your hair instead, his breath warm against the crown of your head for the briefest of seconds before he's pulling away, turning with practiced speed toward the clock on the wall as if it just called his name. The muscles shift beneath his sweatshirt in a clean line that leads away from you, and your heart settles somewhere heavy and low in your chest.
“You should hurry, or you'll be late,” he says without looking at you, and there's a waver in his voice that tells you exactly how much he wanted to kiss you a moment ago.
“Yeah,” you agree quietly, and take a step backward, untangling yourself from his orbit, focusing on gathering up your things, smoothing down your shirt, and preparing to leave. As you walk towards the front door, you glance back at him, standing in the kitchen with his back turned to you with one hand braced on the kitchen island, and force a smile that he can't see. “See you tonight, alright?”
You're folded onto the master bedroom floor, legs crossed at an angle that promises stiffness later, with one of Leon's work shirts draped over your thigh like a surgical blanket. The fabric is cool against your skin, crisp but worn in places — elbows, cuffs — where his shape has pressed into it over years and smells like him, faint traces of his woody and clean cologne. The missing button sits exposed on the cuff, a dark circle of vacancy where the small, disk of shell should be.
The sewing kit lies open beside you, a zipper pouch of miniature chaos, a jumble of colors tangled around plastic cards, needles winking in the lamp light, a thimble like a tiny silver helmet. Your phone sits propped against a pillow, speakerphone active, Leon's voice emerging from it as if from a tin can stretched between two trees. He's three days into being out of state: there's the familiar rasp of sleep deprivation threading through his otherwise smooth baritone, still funny on instinct, giving you just enough warmth to make the distance feel manageable.
“You’re gonna butcher it,” he says after listening to you mutter at the thread for a full ten seconds.
You bite the end off and squint down at the needle, clearing your throat to get rid of the scratch building there. “Do you want your favorite shirt saved or not?”
“That’s my least favorite shirt, actually.”
“It is not, liar.” Your fingertip stings, a pinprick of blood welling to the surface, and you stick it in your mouth to stop the bleeding. You're terrible at this, the way some people are bad at singing or math equations. The needle slips through the button hole and the thread goes slack, the knot refusing to behave. It's an affront to the universe that the man who can sew a bullet wound can't fix a damn shirt. “It’s the one you wear to every awards dinner, and every time you’ve met with the President—”
“Okay, okay. Jesus, you’re like the FBI of blouses. Or the CIA of…”
“Don’t be corny.”
“Well, what’s left behind my personality if you take that away? It’s like ramen without any seasoning.”
“I’d say that’s cultural appropriation. At least say pasta. You are Italian.”
“Pasta is still good when it’s plain, a little crispy and brown with extra butter.”
Your mouth twists downward.
“Hey, don’t make that face,” he says. It’s not even a video call. You wish you’re making this up.
“Fine. What about how you’re insinuating plain noodles are less than pasta?”
“Nuh-uh. You’re not getting me today.”
“How about I also tell you crispy pasta with extra butter isn’t plain pasta?”
“It is. That’s the definition of plain pasta.”
“It’s not. Boiled pasta is plain pasta. If you want to keep the playing field even—”
“It’s boiled. Boiled. It’s even in the adjective for ya’.”
“It’s still plain. That’s the inference.”
“Then the inference with the noodles changes because you don’t boil them. You put hot water and they soften.”
That wasn’t even remotely true. “How about I put you in hot water and soften you, huh?”
“Nah, I’d get hard.”
You drop the needle and massage your forehead, but there’s still a smile on your face. “I fucking — swear to god—”
“I’d still have good packaging.”
“What?”
“If I were plain noodles. Sorry, plain pasta.”
You clear your throat, “It would be crinkled at this point, though. You know what they say, right?”
“Just because the wrapper is wrinkled, doesn’t mean the candy is any less sweet?”
“No!” you absolutely holler with delight, picking your needle back up, “Expired! It means—”
“Hey, you taught me that one, no take-backs.” He laughs, that low, quiet sound that means his eyes have crinkled, and the backs of his knuckles are pressing to his forehead. “You’re still buying what I’m selling, aren't you?”
“It’s called good marketing.”
“Mm. Good thing you also have a weakness for cheap carbs.”
“Don’t make me sew a fucking drawstring into this, Kennedy.”
“Yeah,” he says, and it’s not even a full word, more like air leaving his body. “Missed that mouth of yours.”
The needle almost pricks your finger and you momentarily give yourself a break by taking a sip from the mug of honey herbal tea sitting by your side. “Yeah, well, I missed your hands on it.”
“Stop,” he warns, his voice a notch more searing than before, the laughter strained. “Come on.”
“What?” You keep trying to get the damn button back on the damn shirt, but his reaction has heat prickling in the tips of your fingers. You're too aware of the fabric, the weight of the empty sleeve against your leg, and the fact that the bed is only a foot away, rumpled from sleep and taking up space in your periphery. You could've sat on it, could've done this at the dresser, but you're on the floor, cross-legged in pajama pants, and the position is suddenly vivid. “Am I not allowed to talk now?”
“Not unless you're prepared to follow through. I'm not exactly surrounded by privacy at the moment, angel.”
Angel. It hits you right behind the sternum and flutters, the same way it has since the first time. He's said it a thousand times, said it in public, whispered it in hotel rooms and growled it against your throat in the dark. Said it so many times, in fact, that the flutter should've faded by now. It never has.
“I mean,” you say, taking another sip from the mug, faking casual, trying to focus on the needle you're absentmindedly twirling between your thumb and index finger, the button, anything other than that word and the way his tone changed, “I could send a picture.”
“That's cute. Of what, the button? Should I send a pic of the report I'm reading for context? Really get you hot and bothered by the fourth paragraph, babe.”
The cough catches you mid-sip, making your hand jerk for the tea to slosh against the sides of the mug. You set it down quickly, turning your head away from the phone as your body works through the reflex. The fabric of your pajama sleeve muffles the sound, but the vibration of it travels up your arm — a dry rasp that settles into a deeper, more productive hack that leaves your chest feeling prickly and itchy from the inside.
“Shit,” you mutter into the crook of your elbow, the sound coming out muffled. “Sorry.”
The background noise, which had been a constant low white noise of what sounded like paper rustling has stopped completely. The line is live, but Leon himself has gone conspicuously quiet.
“Fine, I'm fine,” you say before he can ask. “Just went down the wrong pipe.”
“That's not down the wrong pipe.” His voice is flat, stripped of the teasing lilt from moments ago. It's the clipped, precise tone he uses for field reports, the one that makes your stomach clench even though it's never directed at you personally. “You didn't have that cough when I left.”
“Yeah, it just started. Probably just—”
Another cough, this one softer but more persistent. You press the heel of your hand against your sternum. “—picked something up. Remember Mara? The care package? This feels exactly like what she had. And she’d been wearing a mask too. Maybe I should shoot a message to the office—”
“Have you been short of breath at all?”
“No. Seriously, baby, it's a cold, at worst.”
“Any fever?”
“I don't think so.”
“Did you take your temperature?”
“Leon, I'm not eight,” you say, rolling your eyes. “It's just a cough. Don't worry so much, okay?”
“Are you itchy at all?”
You click your tongue and sigh. “Why would I be itchy? What are you thinking, chicken pox or measles or something? She would have told me if she was sick like that.”
“Just trying to eliminate possibilities.”
“Okay, well eliminate your current line of questioning. You're starting to sound like a hypochondriac.”
There's an exasperated sigh on his side and aggressive shuffling that makes the speakers crackle. “Okay. Okay, okay...”
“Leon.”
“Fuck, I need to go. Can't do this over a goddamn cell phone anyway, not on this signal. Shit.” He doesn't even sound like he's talking to you anymore.
There is the muffled, distant quality of his hand covering the mic, and his voice gets quieter, the words indistinct and hard to catch. Someone answers him, the sound patchy and barely audible, and then Leon's voice gets louder again as his palm moves away. “Promise to call me if it gets worse, alright? I'll get someone to check on you if I can't be there. Promise me.”
“Baby,” you try, the confusion making you blink rapidly. You set the shirt aside, leaning forward toward the phone as şf getting closer to a skittish animal. “I will. It's fine, I promise, I'm not going to drop dead on you from a common cold.”
“Just... fuck,” The rest of the sentence is cut off, and he sucks in a breath that sounds grim and shaky. For a second, you wonder if something has happened on his side. “I'm sorry. Look, I gotta go. Love you.”
He’s gone before you can reassure him a bit more.
> Sherry: Heard you’re under the weather. I’m nearby. Want me to drop off soup?
“Oh my fucking god,” you mumble into the back of your hand, sniffling. Your voice sounds like gravel underfoot.
The phone drags at your fingers, heavy as a brick as you squint at Sherry's message that reflects the afternoon light that knifes through the blinds. Your temples pound in tandem with the cough that's taken up residence in your chest, a dry, useless hacking that won't leave you alone.
One day into working from home right in the aftermath of your call with Leon, and your desk looks less like a workspace and more like a sickbay battlefield. Tissue boxes flank your laptop like artillery, a half-empty mug of lukewarm tea sits abandoned beside a stack of forms you've been staring at without comprehension for the better part of an hour, your thermal blanket hugging your shoulders like a shawl.
You slide your phone onto the coffee table, where it lands with a soft thud amid the crumpled tissue graveyard. Of all the people to show up, of course it would be Sherry. “Nearby” my ass. The DSO headquarters is a twenty-minute drive without traffic, and you've lived long enough in Leon's world to know “nearby” is code for “I've been dispatched to check on you because someone who won't call himself is panicking about your cough.”
Your throat is a landscape of raw glass, a swallow a grind of shards against the tender flesh. Levering yourself off the swirly chair costs you almost everything; your joints pop like firecrackers, a chorus of small betrayals announcing a body that's aged decades in a single night. The kitchen recedes, a distant shore at the end of a hallway that stretches as you move like a novice tightrope walker, breath as worthless currency, desperate not to set off the next round of your lungs' mutiny.
Your reflection in the nearby window is a stranger: pale, exhausted, with dark circles that look like someone pressed their thumbs beneath your eyes. You blink slowly, twice, wondering how Leon would react if he could see you now. The thought is followed by a wave of irritation — how much easier this would be if he hadn't spent the last month building walls between you, making his paranoia your problem.
That's not fair, you think immediately after, tellling yourself very firmly that a married man is allowed to freak out a little when his wife gets sick in his absence.
Even though he's not been picking up his phone.
The cabinets open with a squeak that grates on your frayed nerves. You reach for a glass, your fingers clumsy as they close around it. The water from the filter is cold against your lips, a brief respite from the burning sensation that's taken up residence in your chest.
The thought of Sherry appearing at your door with soup while you look like death warmed over is mortifying. Not just the physical embarrassment, but the implication — that Leon would rather send his surrogate daughter to check on his wife during what might be nothing more than a stubborn cold than pick up the phone himself.
“Overbearing idiot,” you mutter, not without fondness, and tap out a quick answer.
> You: I'm sorry he's making you do this, Sherry.
The little bouncing ellipses pop up immediately, showing her typing a response. A few seconds later, a gif of Super Nanny in a car with the caption of 'You guys are in a crisis, I'm on my way,' fills the screen.
> Sherry: Don't apologize. You know he can’t order me around even on a good day. Be there soon! 👍
“He's lucky I love him,” you grumble, pulling a face at the phone and dropping it on the island.
Your husband's not a particularly paranoid person. At least, not outside of the context of his job. That paranoia comes with the territory of being a high-ranking agent and working directly under the POTUS. He has a right to worry about threats, especially after the things he's seen and experienced. But his tendency to fret has always been limited to his professional life, where he's had to cultivate that sense of hyper-vigilance and suspicion.
At home, he's always been the relaxed one, the easygoing partner who tells you to calm down, to stop fussing. Even when he's stressed or tired or distracted, he's able to flip that switch and let go of the anxiety that dogs him at work. It's a skill not everyone has, and a crucial one, given the kind of work both of you do. Being capable of compartmentalizing isn't just helpful; it's essential.
He's not very good at it right now, it seems. A symptom of September 30th flare-up, no doubt.
Sleep won’t hold.
Every time you slip under, the fever yanks you back up with a pinch behind the eyes, a dry fire that licks at the back of your throat, and the suffocating cling of damp sheets against your legs. When your eyes flutter open again, the room has drowned in darkness except for that stubborn stripe of streetlight knifing across the foot of the bed.
Your room, not the big one down the hall.
The arrangement had started as a way to not disturb each other in a very schedule-conflicting time of your lives and stayed because it suited you both too well: the master bedroom you shared when you wanted to sleep together, and your own rooms for the nights when one of you wanted quiet or work or simple space. Before long, though, someone would scurry from their own bed to the other's room, and start out as always: one flopping onto the other's mattress, pretending it was just to hang out for a few minutes. It always ended the same way, though — a sleepy, cozy pile-up of tangled limbs and shared blankets, breathing in time.
Tonight Sherry had taken one look at your fever and herded you into your own bed with medicine on the nightstand and enough pointed casualness to make quarantine sound temporary and reasonable.
But. Back to the point.
There is somebody sitting beside you.
Your heart kicks once before a hand settles more firmly over your forehead.
Gloved.
“Easy,” Leon says.
The leather is cold. Not room-cold. Outside-cold.
Your eyelids are leaden, each blink an effort as his image gradually sharpens from watercolor blur to clarity. Leon is turned toward you on the edge of the mattress, one knee pressed deep into the bedding, his shoulders rounded in a permanent hunch as if he'd leaned over to check you and simply locked in position. He's still wearing his leather jacket, the dark leather glistening like oil where the rain hasn't yet evaporated. Damp patches bloom across his shoulders and chest, the fabric clinging to his outline in a way that exposes the tension in his back. His hair, usually styled with just enough defiance, is plastered to his forehead and temples in wet strands that catch the minimal light, dripping occasionally onto the pillow beside you. His face is wet too — the rain has left beaded droplets along his soft jawline, trailing paths down the column of his throat. He smells of car air freshener in that synthetic pine way that means he's been driving too long, of cold air clinging to his damp clothes, and beneath it all, the faint, stale bitterness of coffee turned cold in a paper cup hours ago.
“Leon?”
Your voice comes out rough and small.
His thumb strokes once along your hairline through the glove, smooth leather over damp skin. “Hey.”
It is the way he says it that gets you. Not soft, exactly. Worn down to the grain.
You swallow and wince. “What time is it?”
“Late.”
You manage a dry look at him from the pillow. “Very helpful.”
The corner of his mouth twitches, then drops.
When you shift, the room tilts with you. Leon’s hand leaves your forehead and slides into your hair instead, combing with a care so controlled it feels clumsy. He pets your head once, then again, slow enough that you can feel him deciding where to put his fingers.
He still has his gloves on. The jacket, too.
You should say something about that.
You don’t.
Your eyes flutter closed as his gloved palm engulfs your cheek, thumb grazing the swell of it. You lean into his touch instinctively, body responding before your mind catches up, all the distance dissolving in that single gesture, and you realize your shoulders have been permanently tensed, waiting for this contact. A breath you didn't know you were holding escapes your lips, trembling as it passes. His fingers still encased in that cold barrier has come to represent so much between you, yet it's sugar melting in the water with such simple intimacg, and you're ashamed of how much your body is betraying you, how it arches toward him like a plant starved of sunlight, silently begging for more.
His whole body locks.
It is immediate. The line of his shoulder goes hard. The breath he had been taking breaks in the middle and starts over smaller. Even feverish, you can feel the strain of him holding still under that one stupid, instinctive lean.
“You're supposed to be halfway across the country,” you murmur, eyes half-open.
“Was worried,” he finally says, a kink between his lowered eyebrows, gingerly sitting himself at the very edge of the mattress as if to keep from disturbing you. It's so fucking funny considering how massive he is. Big, broad, tall, trained to kill, in his combat gear. Trying not to take up space.
“I know. Sherry already did her Florence Nightingale routine and everything.” You wave a limp, lazy hand at the orange pill bottle on the nightstand, the glass of water.
“Yeah.”
You watch his face. “I can’t believe you sent her.”
His eyes stay on you. “You can’t?”
You would argue if your bones did not feel full of wet sand. The effort of keeping your eyes open is already getting stupid. Still, there is enough strength left in you to see what he looks like in the half-dark.
Not dramatic enough for a man who you're guessing drove like hell to get home just because of a little cold. Leon never goes dramatic when he can help it. What he does instead is worse. His jaw is set so hard the muscle keeps jumping near the hinge. He is sitting on the edge of the bed like he does not trust himself to settle his weight any farther in. He hasn’t even unzipped his jacket. One glove stays in your hair. The other is braced on his thigh, fingers curled tight.
He's going to get sick himself at this point, just from being a wet dog.
“Come here,” you mumble.
He doesn’t move.
For a second you think he didn’t hear you. Then you see his mouth pull tight.
You pull your hand out from under the blanket and catch weakly at the front of his jacket. The leather is damp and chilled through. “Bed,” you say. “C’mon.”
His eyes drop to your hand.
Want caught on the act, held by the throat.
The leather creaks, and his chest lifts in a shallow inhale. Then the want evaporates from his expression. His gloved hand covers yours, pries it off his jacket, and puts it carefully back on the mattress. Your arm has turned to lead. You can only watch as he leans away from you to grab a tissue from the box on the nightstand, and then his hands are at his own face, wiping the rain off with careful swipes, catching the last of the drips in his lashes and his hair. He folds the tissue and tosses it at the wastebasket, and his aim is so perfect it pisses you off.
“Who's gonna look after you if I get sick too?” he says, and his voice is perfectly level, and you hate it, you hate him, and his stupid gloves, and his stupid job, and the virus chewing on your brain, and every mile that has stretched between the two of you since—
“I won't get you sick, here, just,” you blurt out, loud and jumbled, shooting up and immediately getting dizzy.
And Leon is right there, grabbing your arms, steadying you, “Woah, hey, careful, baby.”
Your fingers, fever-hot and trembling, lock around his forearm before he can pull away completely. The leather of his jacket, still damp with rain, is slick under your grip. With the last of your energy reserves, you tug with urgent pull that stems from months of missed touch and the primal need to have him close when your body feels like it's failing you.
It's enough to throw him off-balance.
Leon goes down with a surprised grunt that sounds more like air being knocked out of him than anything. He lands awkwardly, his back thumping against the headboard while one leg drapes over the side of the bed and the other gets tangled in the sheets. For a moment, his eyes are wide, the blue of them almost white in the dim light, his mouth slightly parted in a perfect “O” of shock.
Then he's moving, trying to extract himself, but you're already on him. You're not proud of how you do it — using his confusion and his worry to your advantage — but pride has no place in this. This is a war of attrition. So, you use whatever weapons you have at your disposal. In this case, the element of surprise and his hesitation. You straddle him, pinning him in place with a determination that belies the weakness in your limbs. The fever might be eating at you, but you won't let it consume the memory of his warmth. Not tonight.
“Stay,” you whisper, and it's both a command and a plea, coming out husky.
In the shadows of the room, his features are barely discernible, a study in chiaroscuro. But his eyes, they shine with a intensity that cuts through the darkness.
He doesn't push you away. His Adam's apple underneath the turtleneck bobs in a silent swallow, his hands hovering in the air, unsure of where to land. Finally, they settle on your waist, not gripping, but resting there, the heat of his palms seeping through the layers of fabric and skin, reaching into the marrow of your bones. You should question that. You should...
A sigh escapes him, long and heavy, a surrender, an acceptance, an apology all rolled into one. “Okay,” he murmurs, his voice a rough caress in the quiet. “Okay, I'll stay.”
The tension funnels out of him all at once, a release you feel in the way his shoulders lower and his hands lose their careful distance. The shudder that goes through his body is deep enough that you feel it through your thighs, where you're still straddling him. He's wrapping his arms around you finally, pulling you closer with a kind of desperate gentleness that feels like an apology and a confession all at once. The leather creaks as he shifts his hips forward, working himself backward until his back presses against the mattress and his legs straighten onto the covers with a soft thud of his boots hitting the floor. You let yourself settle, shimmying down until your cheek rests against the cotton of his turtleneck, right over his heart.
“My Leon,” you cough a little, “I've missed you...”
A noise rumbles in his chest. His heartbeat quickens beneath the cage of his ribs. He is solid and warm, and in spite of the fever that's turning you inside out, the universe is suddenly in its right axis again. You're exactly where you belong. Nothing can shake this truth, not even the tremor in his breath. And you, despite the burning in your eyes, find the strength to smile. Here, in the cradle of his body, the world can fall apart a thousand times, and you'd still feel safe. “I love you,” you mumble, feeling the words reverberate in his sternum. “Love you so damn much...”
He doesn't echo the words, but his response is just as eloquent: his arms tighten like steel cables sheathed in skin and sinew, gathering you in until your cheek is more comfortable against the pillow of his chest. The sheer breadth of him is overwhelming — shoulders that seem to span the width of the bed, pectorals thick as armor plating beneath the damp cotton of his turtleneck, biceps that flex against your side with the effortless power of a man who has never known weakness. One of his hands rub your shoulder, the other pressing into your spine. He envelops you completely, and for a moment, the storm that rages outside and the fever that ravages your insides are equally insignificant against the solid, undeniable reality of Leon Kennedy holding you like you're the only thing in the world worth protecting.
You feel his nose in the mess of sweat-slick hair at the crown of your head, breathing in. Another tremor, a hitch of his chest, and the unmistakable sound of a suppressed cough.
With a small sound, you give a kiss to the swell of his pec, and also attempt to hug him back like he's a huge teddy bear. At least, that's the comparison that makes sense in your addled mind. The broad expanse of him, the solidity of muscle and bone, the way his heat radiates and envelopes you — it all conjures an image of an oversized stuffed toy. It's also so comfortable laying on top of him. Your own arms can't quite reach all the way around his massive frame, so you end up clutching fistfuls of his jacket at the sides, hugging him as much as you can in the position you're in.
He shifts a bit, and when you rest your chin on his chest and look up at him, you find that Leon's head is turned to the left, and the back of his right hand is pressed to his face, the black leather of his glove dark against the deep, dark red that's overtaken his ear.
“Leon,” you mumble, and his name comes out slurred. Your eyelids are slow to blink as well, and you realize that you're probably seconds away from passing the hell out now that he's with you. Damn. Well, at least you had the presence of mind to lock him into a cuddle first, though. That's a win, at least.
“Go to sleep, baby,” he says in a buttery, low rumble, sending a fresh new wave of flush over your face. His other hand finds its way to the nape of your neck, and the pressure of his thumb is gentle. It traces a small circle there, finding the dip of your vertebrae, the delicate knob that marks the base of your skull.
“Hmm,” you reply, and that's the best you can do. You're pretty sure his hand is going to lull you to sleep.
But Leon still hiding his face bothers you. Rotating your arm out of the hug is an effort that sends a shiver through your fevered body, but you manage, hovering your hand above his. The leather of his glove seems to breathe against your fingertips. You begin to trace the sliver of exposed skin at his inner wrist with your thumb, and his fingers twitch instantly in response.
“Le-on...”
No response other than a loud swallow.
Your nail catches at the leather hem, and you toy with it for a little bit, observing his reaction. Which is a gruff grumble, followed by a click of his tongue that gives away he’s going to tell you off. But before he can do that, the tips of your middle and ring fingers slide right into the semi-tight space between his flesh and the non-elastic glove. Right away, heat slams into you — a furnace blast that makes your own fever feel like a passing chill. His pulse hammers beneath your touch, frantic against the inside of his wrist.
Through the resistance of the leather glove, you venture higher, skimming the calloused heel of his palm, your touch feather-light against the deep lines etched there — the life line, the love line, the dips and rough patches, all the maps of him. Up and down. Up and down. Just the faintest graze of your fingertips across the hills and valleys of his palm.
His breathing is uneven. Short inhales, longer exhales. You catch a brief glimpse of teeth sinking into his lower lip, then his free hand slides from the back of your neck and comes to rest at the base of your throat. His index and middle finger press gently against your fluttering pulse point, and the sensation is intimate, a mirror of the tender exploration of his palm. But there's a tremor in his touch, too, a subtle vibration that travels from his fingertips to the core of you. It sends a quick shot of warmth spreading through your veins. His grip tightens slightly, possessive, protective. Or maybe that's just the delirium talking. Maybe you're projecting your own need onto him.
“Leeeoooon...” You draw the 'E' sound of his name out, and it comes out a whine. “Let me... I missed you...”
He only says your name with a bassy baritone.
“Jerk,” you mumble. Your fingers curl, pressing into the very middle of his palm in a scooping motion, and his chest rises in a sudden gasp.
Why is this so sensual?
It's... It's a belated realization that this is a bit like. Uh.
But your body has detached from logic, operating on a deeper, more instinctive current than your fever-fogged mind can follow as your fingertips continue to ghost over his palm and push his glove up little by little, your brain is starting to go blissfully blank. The fact that his gloved hand is covering his mouth and the breath he just sucked in doesn't register in the slightest. But him looking down, his shiny eyes and the pink tint on his cheeks does.
“Hi, handsome,” you whisper, and his eyebrows furrow at that. A low, frustrated grunt vibrates in his throat.
In the next instant, his free hand lifts from the crook of your shoulder and slides through your sweat-damp hair. He gathers a fistful at the back of your head and pushes your face into his tits, effectively muffling anything else that might come out of your mouth.
“Go to sleep,” he repeats, and his voice has that commanding, serious edge that he uses when his patience is running thin, and it's a warning.
Your fevered brain decides on the best possible course of action: you bite his chest through the damp cotton. Not hard enough to hurt, but enough that he gives a hiss that vibrates through his ribcage and into your cheek. The fabric tastes like salt and sweat, and the heat of him seeps through the material. When you try to lift your head, curious about the noise, his fingers tighten in your hair, keeping you pressed against him. The grip isn't painful, but it's unyielding — a clear command to stay put that sends another wave of dizzying contentment through your fever-addled body.
“Seriously,” he says in that gravelly way, and his chest expands in a long, steadying intake. “I'm gonna leave if you're just going to be a little shit.”
You smile into the rumpled turtleneck and shake your head, the softness of his pecs a comforting weight against your cheek. “Please no,” you say, immediately turning away to cough after. “'M sorry, just wanna see you.”
The tension in Leon's body underneath you eases a fraction, and his grip on your hair loosens. “Then settle down and quit playing. You're burning up, and I know you're exhausted, so stop fighting it and get some rest, okay?”
“'Kay,” you agree, snuggling deeper into his embrace, relishing the solid warmth of him and the elevated rhythm of his heartbeat under your ear. “Love you. Missed you.”
“I know,” he replies, all rumbly. “Missed you, too.” Then his lips brush against the crown of your head, the contact brief but unmistakable, and the kiss is tender and reassuring. It's not one of those passionate, hungry kisses that make you melt, but the affection in the gesture is undeniable, and it makes your heart flutter. “Sleep. You need it.”
And with that, your eyes drift shut, and the world falls away, leaving you adrift in a sea of contented warmth.
“No, it's okay, I can talk. She's asleep.”
Your consciousness surfaces slowly, the fever's grip loosened from a stranglehold to a firm handshake. Your eyes crack open through the gummy residue of sleep, and you find yourself in your bedroom, buried under the comforter. The bedside lamp throws a weak yellow glow across the room while the rest stays swallowed in shadow. Leon is sitting propped up against the headboard, the muscles on his arm bulging as it holds his phone to his ear. You're curled into his right side, arm draped across his lap, and his other hand rests on your shoulder, thumb moving in slow, absent circles. Still gloved, you notice. Jacket's gone, though.
You don't move.
It's not eavesdropping. Not really. If you stir, he'll probably get up to finish the call somewhere else, and you're too warm and too tired to lose him right now.
“The answer’s still no,” he says quietly. “I don’t plan on telling her.”
Your heart gives a particular, harsh rap on your ribcage. It’s then that you notice the other voice on the line belongs to a woman.
“I know. Yeah, I know. I've been careful about that. Separate bedrooms are really working in my favor right now, but doesn’t seem like it is. Still, one can’t be too vigilant.”
Ice slides through your veins.
His thumb presses harder against your arm, as if grounding you there, and your body freezes so completely that the air in your chest has nowhere to go. “Stop. Don't be like that. You agreed to let me handle this my way, remember? It's my marriage. I can't — I’m not springing this on her in the middle of everything else. It would crush her.”
What the hell is he talking about?
Your eyes are wide open now, fixed on the wrinkled fabric of his jeans, and your mind is racing through every possible interpretation. None of them are good. Not a single one.
“How are things going on your end?” His voice shifts, softness creeping in. “How far along are you now?”
Your stomach drops through the floor.
“Fuck. Okay. No, no, we'll figure something out. Take care of yourself, alright? And check in regularly. I mean it.” There's a pang in his voice, a blend of concern and frustration. His gloved palm moves from your shoulder to the back of your head and he's quiet for a moment, listening, before he speaks again. “Yeah. Talk to you soon. Bye.”
The line clicks off.
You squeeze your eyes shut, feigning sleep, and try to keep your breathing steady. A thumb strokes, idly, along the curve of your ear, and he breathes out, an almost inaudible, “Fuck,” as his head thuds back against the headboard.
By morning the fever is gone. Only a tickle and the most annoying swelling in your throat remains of the cough, as well.
What they leave behind is the sour, washed-out weakness of having sweated through half the night and lived to tell the tale. The sheets are tangled. Your hair is a mess at the back of your neck. Your throat still feels rubbed raw, but the pressure behind your eyes is gone, and the room has stopped tilting every time you move.
Leon is already dressed.
He is by the dresser with his back half-turned, fastening his watch, having changed into a quarter zip compression shirt. His jacket is laid over the chair. His duffel sits open on the bench at the foot of the bed with that neat, economical packing job of his that always makes it look like he was never really there to begin with. The leather gloves are still on.
You push yourself up against the headboard and watch him fold a charger, tuck it away, zip a side pocket shut.
“Wow,” you say, head bobbing with the big swallow you have to take to be able to sound normal. “Caught you before you could put cash on the bedside.”
Leon glances at you from the corner of his eye, and flicks to the window. He reaches up to adjust the blinds, letting in a few more inches of daylight, then struts over, close enough to touch, close enough that the mattress dips when he braces one knee against the side of the bed. His gloved right hand lands on your forehead, then the side of your neck, checking by habit. Cooler now. You can feel the relief in the breath he lets out through his nose.
“Fever broke,” he says.
“Apparently I’m a medical miracle.”
The corner of his mouth twitches, pulling tighter before it smooths back out. “Don’t get cocky. You still look a little rough.”
“What a flirt,” you manage to smile, and it feels rusted, closing your eyes as Leon traces the shape of your face in that fond, gentle way of his. The back of your nose is burning, and you sniff it back down. The conversation from the night before stuck in your head is a parasite that won't let go, and it's killing the mood.
You hold out a hand without thinking much about it. A small, ordinary thing. Come here. Stay a minute.
For one second, his body answers before the rest of him does, shifting backwards imperceptibly. And that minute hiccup of a hesitation is enough for you to withdraw, curling your fingers inward, resting them back on the sheets and nod a couple times in a rapid fashion, “Okay.”
“Hey,” Leon is frowning, and his hand reaches for yours.
You snatch it before he can, holding both your hands up in a surrendering gesture. “It's fine.”
“I just have to—”
“It's fine, Leon,” you cut in, pushing the comforter aside and swinging your legs off the opposite side of the mattress so that your back is to him. You don’t see him flinch because of the lack of endearment. “I get it. I do. It's a work hazard. Can't get you,” — your eyebrows rise to emphasize the word — “infected while on the field, right?”
It's not like you two were basically cuddling the whole night or anything.
Leon pushes off the mattress, his boots, which you hope are clean because it was raining yesterday and god help his soul if you find any trace of mud in the house later, make almost no sound as he navigates around the bed. He stops at the foot of it, a solid silhouette against the morning light bleeding through the blinds. Not too close with that careful distance. You can feel his eyes on your profile, even before you turn to meet them, and you know exactly what he's doing — the way he always does when he's trying to gauge the temperature of a room without touching it, and that makes the heat in the back of your head flare hotter.
Silence.
“Listen, I...” his voice trails, and the pause is a beat long.
Your lips press together, and you can't decide if it's more exasperating that he's actually struggling to come up with the words, or that you two still have to dance around the issue — whatever it is.
Whatever it possibly is.
And that thought has you feeling so cramped that you have to say it before it can choke you, “Have I done something?”
Leon is halfway into bending to grab the duffel bag's handle, and that question brings his head up. A total deer in headlights, even through the long hair strands falling over his face. He fumbles with what to do about the luggage, and then abandons the idea entirely, straightening to his full height. “What? No. What are you talking about?”
Yeah, great. He's got the most comically forced oblivious look in his face. Like a cartoon character. You could almost draw the white scribbles of confusion circling his head.
“Don't. You know what I'm talking about. Just—” you bite down on the inside of your cheek. Hard. Your stomach turns loops over loops in anticipation. “Just, please, tell me. What is this? Is it another woman?”
His brows snap together immediately, head tilting as he rapidly blinks as if you blew a breath right into his eyes. “What?”
You get out of bed more slowly than your pride would prefer. Your legs are weak. The floor is cool under your feet. You cross to him in one of his old shirts and yesterday’s sleep-wrinkled shorts and stop close enough that he has to either meet your eyes or step back.
He meets them.
“This is ridiculous.” Leon shuts his eyes and shakes his head, palms the back of his neck, rubbing at the hair there. “We’re not doing this. You're sick, and you're overtired, and we can talk about this when you're better.”
“When I'm better. Right. I've been better this whole time, and it never occured to you to talk about it then?”
“There is no other woman! How could you ever think that of me!” Leon snaps like a glacier fracturing, it startles him more than it does you. His eyes dart to the floor as if searching for an escape route between the floorboards. He brings one gloved hand up to rub at the hinge of his jaw, thumb pressing into the muscle there while his fingers curl into a loose fist, thumb obscuring his mouth as if he might bite it.
Your entire face is on fire. Sweating bullets, but the cold kind, where you can feel the blood going down the drain, and the shakiness of the adrenaline rush from the chest. “Then give me something. Anything. Because from my point of view, you avoid kissing me, let alone touching me as if I'm radioactive, you avoid sleeping next to me, you avoid standing too close to me unless you think I’m unconscious. You leave for days, come back, scare the hell out of me, and then the second I’m vertical again you’re halfway out the door. And I don't know what the fuck to do anymore. What do I think? Huh?”
“Not that I'm cheating on you, for god's sake,” the last bit comes out in a harsh whisper, and the man is staring at you like a stranger on the street that has the gall to insult him to his face.
Way to ignore the point you're making and laser-focus on the one thing that pisses him the most off. “That's not the issue here.”
“But it is! It is the issue! I would never do that to you. And. And. That you'd think that after all this time—”
“Look. If you're not interested in sex or don't find me attractive anymore—”
“Are you fucking insane?” Leon's voice pitches upward. He's looking at you in disbelief.
“Forgive me for trying to rationalize your actions, or lack of, since you're not telling me anything, and apparently, I'm insane for that!”
“You are!” Leon's hands fly up, the muscle below his left eye pulses wildly. “You're the smartest person I know. And yet somehow, you've decided that the only possible explanation for what's happening is that I'm cheating on you, or, or,” Leon's face contorts, the rage flushing his skin a blotchy, uneven red that makes him look ill, “that.”
“So you agree,” you spit, folding your arms. You're on the verge of tears. But you've had years of practice at holding them back, and you manage to keep a level voice. “Something is happening?”
He looks at you like he's been stabbed. As if he were the one that had the right to be offended. Like you're the bad guy here. His chest heaves with ragged breaths, the compression shirt stretching tight across his pectorals as he struggles to rein in whatever he wants to say.
“What,” you ask, with a full period at the end.
“I'm not having this argument,” he declares, snatching up the duffel bag, his boots make the floor shake as he storms to the door, and it only gets you more riled up that you have to pick up your pace to match his strides.
“No you don't. This is not how this is going to play out,” you block the bedroom doorway with your arms wide open, and the man barely stops in time to not run you over.
“Get out of the way.”
“No.”
“Stop this, I have to go,” and his tone is dripping, it's not a request, the glare that accompanies the statement is cutting.
“Do you have any idea how much I've been agonizing over what could possible be going on with you for this past month and so?” Your voice finally cracks like an egg on the edge of the words and the vulnerability is the messy egg yolk going absolutely everywhere. “And you just kept playing it up, up, up and up as if I'm stupid.”
Leon's whole body seems to deflate with it, the sigh tearing out of him through his nose in a rush. He turns away, the line of his jaw hard and tight, and closes his eyes, and for a minute he just stands there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, like he can't decide whether to stay or bolt.
“You know how this works! I've been through the rulebook with you a hundred times. You tell me where it hurts, even when it's hard, even when when you have to say you can't say why. I give you your space, I take your long nights, I take your silence, I let you bleed all over the bathroom tiles without asking questions because I trust you to tell me when it matters! All we've ever had is trust. It's the whole damn point. So yes, I think we've finally hit a dead end on this road, because what else could possibly be so bad that you'd rather let me think I'm losing you than tell me the truth?”
“Doesn't seem like you trust me all that much,” Leon mumbles away like one does under their breath while a parent is scolding them.
“Really? That's what you're going with? After all I've said, that's what you're going to say to me?”
“Yeah because I'm still stuck at the fact that you'd think I would cheat on you! You know me! I love you, and I thought you loved me enough to not think that of me—”
“—I do! I do love you! Why else do you think I—”
“—Do you not see the kind of work I have to put in to even be allowed to have a wife? To have you? Do you really believe that I would throw that all away—”
“Then tell me. Tell me. Stop bullshitting. Tell me,” you plead, with that little break in the middle that feels like the sound of your heart straining against its own stitches. The air is heated with the panting from both sides, the silence stretches between you like a mile, and you are the one that is running to the other side of the bridge, “Give me something, anything! Or back to it again, have I done something to make you lose that trust in me?”
Leon's head dips and the sun shines on the dark blond strands of his hair, his gaze falling to the carpet. He's wearing a strange look that is not guilt or shame or anger, but a terrible sort of sorrow. It's a look of resignation. Of a defeated man. “It's not your fault, it's not anything about you, it never is — it's not you.”
You have to admit quite a bit of weight is lifted off your chest after he says that. You take a breath to steady your nerves, but your throat doesn't cooperate and ends up a rattling inhale instead, the remnants of the cold collecting in the back of it and turning the simple act of breathing into a conscious effort.
He looks up at you as if seeing you for the first time since he started packing, and there is such an unmistakable tenderness in his gaze. That's good, right? That's the man you know. Your Leon.
“Okay,” you nod, then keep nodding, “Okay. Then, is it case-related? Are you safe? Are they blackmailing you, threatening you? Did you get caught in some scandal or corruption ring, or, are you in trouble, is it worse than Tall Oaks—”
“Please, baby.” He walks off again, one hand on his hip and the other sweeping down his face. “We really can't do this right now. Not now.”
Back then, a single tear would have been enough to pull him toward you, to make him close the space between your bodies, to murmur apologies against your skin until the anger dissolved.
“Then when? When?”
“Soon, okay, soon, I will, just. After it's over.”
“If it was this simple and you could have just told me, yes there is something and we'll talk about it later, just like how we've always done, by the way, why didn't you? Why did it come to this?”
“It's complicated—”
“It's always complicated in this field! I know! We've lived through the same events over and over again, but this isn't one of them!”
“I know. I know, I'm so sorry.”
You step away towards the huge windows for a breath of fresh air, and wipe the back of one wrist over your eyes, pressing in the tears before they can fully form.
When you turn around, Leon's sagging against the lip of the dresser now, his weight settled into the wood with the kind of defeat you rarely get to see in him, face drained of color, all of it leached away until the skin under his eyes looks bruised and paper-thin in the morning light. He's resting the heels of his hands on the edge, arms straight and supporting the weight of his upper body, and his shoulders have rounded forward into a permanent hunch that suggests he might slide right off the edge if he lets himself.
The phone call.
You have this arrow in your quiver, and the bow is drawn back, taut. It takes everything to lower it again.
Because Leon is not a liar, not really. Not in a way that counts. He omits, he deflects, files the truth away in a drawer with a top-secret seal, but doesn't manufacture a different reality to serve himself.
It's why you're scared.
“I know it's hard, but right now, I need you to trust me. As you've been doing all this time,” he says like a eulogy for a life you're not even aware is over. He spreads a gloved palm flat on his chest as if he’s trying to physically hold something inside himself in place, as if he’s about to come apart at the seams.
You stand your ground, your arms still crossed, and the living hell of a tear starts its slow, inevitable, lived-in path down your cheek, plopping onto your shirt and staining the soft gray cotton with a darker shade. A headache is creeping in between your eyebrows. The fatigue of being sick plus the exhaustion from being emotionally starved for weeks is a dangerous cocktail.
“I'll—” Leon begins, looking for a softer landing for this conversation, some way to de-escalate, but he’s fumbling for the doorknob in a dark hallway. He's the best operative you know, he faced down a literal zombie apocalypse when he was barely out of his teens, and he's struggling to find the words. And that sends a chill through you. “I'll be back as soon as I can.”
You nod, a gesture that feels both magnanimous and performative.
“Meanwhile,” he adds. “You can check my messages, the computer, my phone, tablet — any of it. If it puts your mind at rest.”
Still. Still he's stubbornly on the cheating topic.
“Of course,” you reply, and it comes out as flat as week-old soda. “I'll just spend the whole day snooping through your devices. Like you've assigned me a casefile.”
Leon's face does something complicated, a brief tightening around his mouth before smoothing out again.
“Whatever made you break the one hard boundary between us better be fucking earth shattering or I'm not sure if I can—”
“Baby…”
“Don't,” you snap. His lips clamp shut. “You've made your point, now go do your job.”
Leon's right knee bends as if he's about to lunge toward you, catching his weight mid-motion before the rest of him can follow. His gloved hand lifts off the dresser nd hangs there in the space between you, fingers curling inward as if he's just remembered a burn he can't rub out. The fist drops back to the wood with a muted thud.
His gaze tracks a frantic, useless pattern: the dust motes dancing in the slice of sunlight; the water stain on the ceiling you've both been meaning to fix; the scuff on your side of the bedframe; anywhere, everywhere, but at you. He bites his cheek hard enough that the muscle jumps in his jaw. Then he finally makes himself look at you.
“I love you,” he says, and it's the most honest thing he's said all morning. “More than anything. Everything I do is for you. Please believe that.”
You still do, even though it shrinks into embers sometimes, that trust too stubborn and hopeful to be extinguished. However, the doubt this time around is too forceful of a cold gale, and it's wrapped itself around your heart.
“I'm trying,” you whisper.
It's the truth.