Chapter Text
They call him at the ass crack of dawn about one Grace Ashcroft. Apparently the girl’s not co-operating. They need mean old Kennedy to come get her in line. Or, coerce. Whatever he’s in the mood for. That, and she specifically asked for him. Has been asking for a good while now.
Guess she’s not all too happy about more doctors taking blood samples and whatnot from her after whatever fuckery they did to her at the care center. Huh, who would have thought? Certainly not Leon. Not like he told the suits exactly that but why would they listen to him? He’s only a soldier, a loyal hound. Nothing more, nothing less. Not a fucking therapist. Not his fucking job.
And now the wounded little deer he dragged out of the woods is asking for him. Not bad enough he sunk his teeth into her and dragged her broken little body straight to the wolves. What now, she wants him to maul her too?
He drags his ass from bed, showers, makes himself a nice cup of coffee, adds two necessary fingers of whiskey, and drives himself to work. Sherry finds him at reception. Of course they called her in too. She looks like she’s ready to drop. He offers her a swig of his flask but the ungrateful woman declines.
“Why did they call you?” he asks.
Sherry yawns. “A kind face for the girl maybe?”
Leon huffs. “I can be kind.”
Sherry pats him. “You look like you have one foot in the grave and you’re mad about it.”
“So? She’s blind. I could have my dick on my face and it wouldn’t matter.”
He wonders what they did to her exactly. Grace had her full vision when she was with the FBI. Well, most of it. He remembers seeing cute little glasses on her nose in her ID photo.
He read some of the lab reports while he was at the facility looking for Elpis, and it wasn’t pretty. The descriptions were clinical, more result oriented, but the procedures were noted and they were—
Bad. Bad enough that he didn’t read all of it. He’s retrieved more data on her but hasn’t gone through them yet either. Left that to the analysts. A dying man shouldn’t have to do homework. He should have been given an early retirement, a nice bottle of whiskey, and a sweet bullet to the head by the seaside.
Instead he gets called in at 4am to soothe a crying girl. Who’s going to soothe him? He has problems too.
The infected patches of skin itch. Sometimes it burns, a steady digging feeling, like taking a hot knife to his nerves. It gets even more fun at nights when his whole body feels like it’s decomposing while he’s still alive and kicking. Sleep’s even better when you make it spicy. They sting right now, as he walks the halls of the Wrenwood DSO branch they have Grace at. They’ve kept her pretty deep in, eight floors down, in a shitty imitation of a hospital room. Bulletproof fibreglass, and steel walls. Ugly white furniture, a plastic plant, and all sharp things removed.
The way she had placed his gun in her pretty, pink mouth. Fuck. That picture is engraved in the ugly wrinkles of his brain. He might just bring it out the next time he’s not able to sleep and needs a little push. The dazed, creamy eyes, the shaky little hands, tears against her cheeks, and the taut string of saliva—
Well, if he doubted he’s going to hell, he sure is now. But as much as he’d like to see her try again, they can’t have her succeeding in anything of that sort.
Elpis has turned out to be so much more than the initial intel the DSO had gathered. Grace Ashcroft is not a lost FBI analyst. She’s about to become the DSO foremost weapon in fighting bio-terror. What an honour. Slap a medal on that girl’s trauma and throw her in the burning fire. And leash a feral dog to her side so she knows where to go, whom to kill. Good girl, good dog.
Leon hopes he’ll only be there for a little bit of it. Just the fun parts, before the infection takes over. Let Grace Ashcroft be someone else’s problem. And maybe they’ll also find a cure for Sherry after that.
For now, though…
He enters the glass prison without knocking or preamble. She’s a government asset now. A dog just like him. Well, a kitten at this stage but same difference. Her face lights up when she senses him. And how the fuck she can do that? Knew he was infected too, without eyes, without being told. The answer is probably somewhere in the files he didn’t bother to read.
“Leon,” she says. A statement. No doubts it’s him.
She’s seated on the bed, in a thin gown, not dissimilar to the one she had on at the care centre. Her hair is clean and combed. Soft and downey. Her cheeks are red, and her neck and face are covered in scratches. Her arms too, probably but she’s been put in a straitjacket for now. Cute.
She turns her head towards him, swings her legs on her bed like it’s nothing but there’s a slight tremble in her lower lip.
“Nice digs,” he tells her.
She makes a show of looking around. “T-Thanks. Moved in recently.” Her voice wobbles. Good thing he left Sherry outside. She might have suggested a hug or something equally horrible.
Instead, Leon takes a tentative seat next to Grace. The bed creaks as the mattress goes down from his weight. Just like half of his joints.
“You left,” she says quietly. Not really an accusation yet but has the potential to mutate.
She had fallen asleep in the car. The doctors told him she had been drugged out, and would be gone for quite a bit. So, of course he went home. He has no business with her anymore. Extraction complete. Asset handed to custody. Not his fault she woke up crying and screaming. And apparently scratching her own face off. He feels a slight twinge of guilt but shoves it down. Bleeding hearts get you nowhere. He can’t be going around bringing strays home, even if he has a soft spot for the blonde ones.
“If I stick around,” he says, “you’ll let the docs do their thing?”
She looks defeated. “W-Why? I’m s-sure there were records. O-Of what they d-did to me.”
Too many, he thinks. “They need to know how…stable you are right now.”
“And then w-w-what?”
He shrugs. Realises she can’t see it, and says, “Dunno. Above my paygrade.”
It isn’t. He knows what happens next. Just figures it’s not on him to tell her. Might freak her out and right now he needs to get her to cooperate so he can go back home, beat one out, and slip into a nice, comfortable coma.
“You said,” a hitch in her voice. “Y-You said you’d take me h-home.”
And you believed me, he wants to say. Wants to shake her and tell her she’s a fool. Wants to tell her she should never, ever trust anyone, especially someone with a badge and a gun, but she had a badge and gun once (did she try to put her standard issue between her lips as well?). You’d think that someone like her who’s been burned so badly would flinch before trusting the likes of him.
“In case you couldn’t tell,” he says, “I lied.”
She doesn’t look disappointed. Just stares unseeingly at the wall. He wonders what home he could have even taken her to. Her apartment was repossessed ages ago, and her stuff put in storage. The FBI will have access to that, but a home? That’s all gone for her. Maybe she was thinking of that mother of hers that got her throat slashed in the Wrenwood Hotel. Sick of Victor to kidnap the girl from there, even sicker of her boss to have sent her there in the first place.
Leon intends to have a few words with Nathan Dempsy one of these days, maybe get his finances checked out too while he’s at it. Freeze a few assets here and there, throw in some suspicion and drama, see where that gets him.
“Why did you ask for me?” He needs to know. Surely he’s no longer in her good graces.
“I-I don’t have anyone else,” she says.
Fuck him. Just…fuck. Having him around is worse than having no one but he won’t tell her that. Let her find out by herself. Lessons and all that.
“I can’t take you home,” he tells her bluntly.
“I know.” Resigned, quiet. “I just—” A deep breath. “Can-can you s-stay? I-I don’t like needles.”
He reaches the straps of her jacket behind her back. “And you’ll behave?”
She nods. He pulls the first clasp. The second, third, and untangles her arms and hands, throws the whole thing to the side. She shivers in her thin shift, looking as small as she did the first time he laid eyes on her. Like a kitten in the rain, begging to be brought back home.
The second she’s free, she clutches at him blindly until she finds his arm and sinks her claws in. He lets them stay for a moment, savoring the sting that works to balance the prickling of the infection, before he untangles her grasp and brings her hand into his, pushing his fingers into the space between hers. He rests their hands solidly on his thigh and motions for Sherry to call in the doctors.
She scratched out her own arms, and a few of the medical staff. They come in sulking but they’re gentle with her. Leon makes sure of it. Her hand stays in his, clenching, unclenching with each needle that they bring her. At some point she begins humming in a throaty voice. Not loud enough, just something self-soothing he figures. For her own ears probably but it’s cute. His thumb swipes back and forth against her. Behind the gloves the infection itches.
“So,” he says. “What are you doing after this?” Just something to distract her.
It makes her laugh like he wanted it to. Makes him feel accomplished.
“G-Go for a walk. M-Maybe,” she says. “What about you?”
“Taking you out for ice cream.”
“W-What?” The alarm in her makes him feel funny.
“Ice-cream,” he repeats. “I heard all the kids get it after a shot.”
She frowns. “I’m not a kid.”
He doesn’t think of her as a kid anyway. “Adults can have ice-cream too.”
The hand on his tightens. An injection on her arm. She tries regulating her breathing.
“C-Can we?” she asks after a while. “Actually go for ice cream?”
He wouldn’t mind. Feeling like a blackcurrant cone right now. “Not today,” he says. Probably not ever.
The tests go on for almost an hour. Lots of blood draws, some swabs. There’ll be more of it the next day but when the medical staff eventually file out, the relief in Grace is palpable. She looks wrung out. Worn. He extracts his hand from hers. It’s gone numb now. Girl has a good grip, even if she's kinda dainty. She grabs tight for a second longer and finally lets go.
“You good?” She’s shaking.
“Yeah,” she says.
Liar. But what can he do about it? Nothing. Just because he found the stray doesn’t mean it’s his responsibility. She holds her hands between her knees, presses hard, looks off into the distance. That lower lip keeps trembling. The goddam slip they gave her is too thin. He can see the outline of her tits, the small shadow of her nipples.
“You should get some sleep,” he says. “I’ll come back.” He’ll have to. She’s not his problem but this is his circus.
He takes his jacket off, wraps it around her slight frame, and doesn't try to linger. Eyes up. No need to check out the traumatised girl. Her fingers immediately grasp at the leather. She buries her face in the lining.
“T-Thanks,” she mumbles. “S-See you tomorrow?”
He leaves before he can do anything else stupid.
*
It becomes a routine. Get up, get to Grace, hold her hand, make small talk to distract her while more tests are set up.
Her blood panel turns out a lot more anomalies. Some expected, some not so much. And a few things are left hanging in the air for which they’d have to conduct tests of their own. Leon signs off on all the non-invasive ones. Doesn’t tell her about the long list he got, and the kind of ideas the DSO doctors had. It’s not just Umbrella who employs sick fucks. The government has their own too. Just look at him.
He stays back at the HQ on Wednesday night to go through the entirety of the Elpis report the analysts put together from combing all the data he had shared from the care centre. Sherry joins him and between the two of them they read every gnarly detail, look at every photograph, watch every single recording without skipping. Leon doesn’t flinch. Sherry gets up and takes a break at the halfway point.
They sit out the whole night with takeaway beef noodles and hours and hours of Grace Ashcroft’s life for the past two years. There’s a three minute video of her begging while she’s cut open that makes Sherry slam her laptop shut and put her head on her hands. Leon just pauses to take a bite of his food.
“You don’t have to do this with me,” he tells her.
Sherry just shakes her head.
They both read up on Grace's time before the kidnapping. Lived alone, no friends, no family. Work was her whole life, and somehow they didn’t even notice her absence for a whole week. By then, Victor Gideon had cleaned up after himself, wiped out all the footsteps and disappeared off with his prize.
“We’re catching this guy,” Sherry says, full of conviction. Righteous anger for a girl she’s only said hi to once when Leon allowed it.
“Not our job,” he says.
“Fuck that!” Sherry is screaming.
“We have other problems. We’re dying.”
“Well, fuck that too.”
The infection has been getting worse, slowly crawling up his body. He’s started having occasional bouts of coughing, and a few dizzy spells. Sometimes there’s blood. He’s gritted his way through it but he knows Sherry’s going through the same thing. Their time is running out, and Victor Gideon doesn’t have the answers to that. His entire focus was on Elpis, and Elpis, as it turns out, is just a weapon that has the DSO bigwigs nutting in their pants now.
That is, if Grace can deliver what she’s supposed to. The tests Gideon ran did not offer the desired results, but there were notes that suggested that the subject might have been holding out. That or she needed a more compelling push.
Before they could get to that part of the testing, Leon had burst in and burnt the place down, so of course now it falls on him to find out what potential Elpis truly carries.
“I can’t believe she survived all that,” Sherry murmurs.
Leon sighs. “Don’t think she wanted to.”
The reason Grace is such a good prisoner at the DSO now, other than the initial, let’s call it reluctance, is that Gideon did a splendid job breaking her. She did not think she would escape, didn’t think it would be possible, and now that she’s in another cage, she’s just resigned to her fate.
Helps that Leon isn’t cutting out her organs, but let’s see how she feels about him after tomorrow.
The next morning he brings her a scoop of butterscotch. The face she makes when her hands wrap around the paper cup will haunt him for days. Probably years depending on how bad things go for her.
He woke up with half his body on fire. The infection has reached the side of his face. If he wasn’t ugly before, he’s absolutely horrendous now. He needs to be out there, looking for something that could help him and Sherry. He needs to be out in the field, not fucking babysitting a lost girl turned bio-weapon. But his orders were clear, and Leon is nothing if not an obedient dog. Licks all the right boots, waits patiently for his food, drags the rabbit back to his masters, lets them put her in a glass case and holds her hand while they prepare her for slaughter.
A good fucking soldier.
They’ve finally given her some actual clothes. Clinical green pants and a t-shirt, and even a fucking bra. He catches an eye of the thick black strap when she leans down to take a whiff of his coffee. The instant regret on her face is beautiful.
“W-Why does your coffee smell like vodka?”
“What coffee?” he says, taking a sip.
She’s wearing his jacket. Has made a whole show of claiming it for herself. The one time he tried taking it back, she scratched him. Hellcat.
He’s in no mood to be nice this morning but something about Grace’s face reminds him of the girl on the table, begging and crying. Three minutes and the video had cut out but he’s sure it went on for much longer. Two years worth.
“C-Can I have some?” she asks.
He looks at the nearest doctor. A shake of her head. He sighs. “I’m being told no.”
She reaches for the mug anyway. He pulls her back by the back of her shirt collar. “Behave.”
She sits back with her ice-cream. Greedy little shit. Wants his stuff but won’t offer anything of hers. Didn’t her mother beat that out of her before she kicked the bucket? Teach her nothing?
He lets it go. Today’s going to be a tough day. The day that decides how useful she can actually be. Hence the ice cream for her, the drink for him. He lets her sit and eat in peace for a bit. It’s not that he’s procrastinating, he’s trying to figure out the best way to do this.
She keeps her milky eyes on the ice-cream as she savours it slowly, but he knows the gears in her head are turning. He lets her stew as he enjoys his coffee and his view. Her cheeks are dusted pink, a pretty, stark colour against her pale skin. Wet, red lips, and an equally wet tongue around the plastic spoon. Suction as she savours, and the licks like she’s not had a sweet treat for too long.
On a cold table, saying please, please, please. Red knives and she has tears—
There’s a small smudge on her cheek that bothers him. No manners on the girl. She’s eating like she was never raised at all. The wolf in him wants to lick off the ice-cream from her skin but instead he swipes at it with a gloved hand and pops it into his mouth to taste.
Her eyes widen with shock as if she could see, but she keeps her silence, and so he looks away and joins her in saying nothing.
When the medical staff eventually file out, he waits a little longer. Lets her finish off the rest of her treat and lick the bowl too before he gets up and holds a hand out. She pretends to not know what he’s doing. Pretends to not sense it, or whatever it is that she does because even if she can’t see with her eyes exactly, Leon knows she has some unnatural instinct or intuition that’s a nice little by-product of her time under the knife.
He sighs when she makes no move. He takes the paper cup from her hands, spoon, and the last few drops of the melted butterscotch, throws it in the trash, and then grabs her by the arm.
“Come on,” he says. “Field trip.”
She doesn’t seem surprised. Doesn’t ask questions. Leon’s noticed that a lot too. She’s very hesitant to ask things, making requests even, and absolutely never, ever say no. At least not to him. And certainly not firm enough. She’d sat in her nothing little tissue of a slip for a good two days before he made the med team get her real clothes.
He takes her two levels lower, past three levels more of the restricted zone, and through one very thorough decontamination chamber. His hand remains at her back throughout, under his jacket, but over her top. She starts shivering from the next set of doors, like she can sense where this is going.
“Almost there,” he says, as if it’s supposed to reassure her.
Grace winces. His jacket is too big on her, and he pulls it up, and zips it for her. She clutches his hand, holds it like it’s her only lifeline. Probably won’t be feeling that way by the time this is done.
At the very end of their walk is a medium sized, reinforced room. Not too big to hide in, but not too small for movement either. He keys in the passcode, squeezes her hand, and leads her in. On the other end is glass, but on either side of the room are two thick panels, sealed for now. White all around. There are three cameras, and eyes on the other side of the glass. This is not how the suits wanted it to go. They wanted the girl tied and wired to as many monitoring devices as possible. They wanted her isolated, and tested, but this, Leon had thought, and said, and fought for, would be kinder. And possibly faster in showing results.
He doesn’t want to see her all tied up and pleading again. Not under these circumstances, not unless he’s the one doing it.
When the door to the left opens, Grace jumps. Whatever senses she has when it comes to infected things (and yes, it’s definitely only infected according to her files), was successfully sponged by the door. The low groan of former officer Norman Cole comes in before he does. He used to be a good man, a good officer. Had two kids, widowed. He was working the scene in Wrenwood Hotel when Grace went missing. Might have even talked to her for all Leon knows.
Now half his face is gone, one eye exploded in his socket, a fire poker was shoved in through and through when the DSO had picked him up from the hotel two years ago. He’s even more decomposed now, dropping pieces of flesh as he lumbers around, confused at first. They’ve put a small cocktail of blockers in him for the purposes of this experiment.
Grace digs her fingers into Leon, sharp, with purpose. A breath away from drawing blood.
“L-Leon?” she whispers, and fuck, something about the way she says his name, all wobbly, and trusting but also fearful makes him wonder what it would be like to have that stutter around his cock.
A wild, stray thought. Invasive, like wanting to jump off a tall building just because you’re too close to the edge. Might be he’s been spending too much time with her, might be he’s not had a good fuck since the infection showed up in his body, might be that her whole shy, apple-cheeked, nerdy glasses thing is charming. Or might be that Leon’s a sick fuck who’d like to push the blind, traumatised girl around just to see how well she screams his name.
Possibly the last one. But he doesn’t really intend to find out. He has a job to do.
He brings his hand to the small of her back, and gives her a push towards the lumbering, drugged out zombie.
“I read your files last night,” he tells her. They could be anywhere else, the way he says it. Out by the side of the road, people-watching. Or in his car, and he’s taking her home. He leans against the wall, hands in his pockets.
“S-So?”
He looks at the former Norman Cole pointedly. “We’ll start easy,” he says. “Tell our friend here to take three steps to the left.”
“W-What?” Grace takes a step back. “I c-can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can.”
Grace shakes her head frantically. “T-They tried to—I tried. It doesn’t work. E-Elpis doesn’t work!”
He tilts his head. “Alright.” He shoves himself off the wall, walks towards Cole with slow precision. “Plan B then.”
Cole snarls when Leon gets close enough. Yellowed teeth, half fallen off, and thick saliva dripping down its chin. It wails and reaches for Leon, which is easy enough to dodge. Leon grabs it by the back of its head and marches it towards Grace.
She scrambles back until her back hits the wall with a small thump. The girl has very little weight on her. He should ask the docs to add more protein in her diet.
“W-What are y-you—”
Cole snarls and struggles, but as he brings it close to Grace, Cole doesn’t bother reaching for her. Instead the stupid thing fights to reach around over to Leon.
He lets go and allows Cole to come close enough for Leon to smell his breath. He winces, regretting it immediately. He pivots, gets his hatchet out, kicks out the legs from under the dead thing, and kicks the body that used to be a man until it’s on the floor. It takes four, good, full body hacks to sever the hands off of the guy. Two more to render the legs useless. Leon picks up the zombie by the hair, and pulls it back towards Grace but its snarling mouth immediately snaps shut an inch away from her face. It goes quiet, drool still running down its face.
Grace is shaking, eyes on him, instead of the zombie breathing down her neck. She looks all wide-eyed, and hurt. Like he hurt her. He yanks her hand up and places it against Cole’s mouth. Grace screams, and struggles, but Cole doesn’t move, doesn’t bite.
“What were you saying?” he asks her.
“T-This isn’t m-me,” she says. Lies, he thinks. “I’m not doing a-anything. I don’t know what you r-read in those files b-but I c-can’t—”
“Okay.” He yanks Cole away and watches Grace sink down a bit. He smiles and brings the snarling head up again, and places his left arm near its face. Howling, screeching, and violent, harsh snapping teeth. Close enough. Dangerous, beautiful. That edge of the building. Forty floors down, and then splat. Him.
“W-What are you—Leon?” She looks suddenly more afraid than he’s seen her. Ah, it seems he’s found the button.
He shakes the zombie head, sways it around his arm. “Tell it to stop.” He pulls the head close, then back in time before the teeth can snap around him.
“I-It doesn’t work!” she says. Voice now pleading. “I-I’ve tried. Please. I can’t. It doesn’t w-work!”
She’s getting more worked up now. Hasn’t even considered that he might be bluffing, which, for the record, he isn’t. He’s already infected so there’s nothing more to do there, and Cole was shot with one of Gideon’s designer drugs. DSO has it in good faith (and some experimentation) that Cole can’t infect anyone else with his bite.
Will hurt like a bitch, but won’t be anything a med-injector or two can’t fix. Anything for the cause, Leon tells himself, and the upper brass.
“Please,” Grace is begging. But begging is not what he wants. Not now. Not yet.
“You can make it stop,” he tells her. “Make him stop.”
“I can’t! Please, please, L-Leon. You have to believe me.”
Maybe she isn’t lying. But he can’t know for sure until he dials up the pressure. Under the right conditions, the file had said. He throws down Cole’s useless head on the ground, stomps on it hard enough to crack it.
“Okay,” he tells her. Consoles. “Okay.”
He steps towards her, hands reaching for her and she reaches back with so much trust. She looks ready to sob. He walks them back to the door they came from and knocks with drama.
No one answers back. The door remains closed. He raps it again with more urgency.
“Wrap it up,” he says. “That’s enough.”
Silence. Grace shifts uncomfortably around him. “W-What’s wrong?”
The siren goes off just on time. He looks up in perfect bewilderment. Practiced scrunch of his brows. The panels on both side of the room slide open, the lights around them turn a deep, alarming red, and from within the darkness, the infected file into the room, slow, steady, a veritable torrent.
Grace can’t see but she’ll know that the numbers are bad.
He bangs on the door again, just for her sake. Gotta put on a good show.
“Leon?” The way she says his name should be studied. Not what she can do with Elpis running in her bloodstream. That shit’s beginning to bore him, but the way she says his name. The roll of the two syllables around that pink tongue of hers. Fucking hell.
He wonders, as the hoard of zombies close in around him (they genuinely don’t care about Grace), if it’s the age thing that’s setting him off. He’s always been an asshole. A freak. A degenerate. Must be the idea of a pretty, young, absolutely vulnerable thing that’s making him all horny like this. Something about the innocence too. Yeah, definitely that as well.
He makes a show of getting overwhelmed. Hacks away as much as he can to make sure he doesn’t actually die here, but is sloppy enough to keep up the act. His view of her keeps getting obstructed but from a glimpse she looks sufficiently frightened. He doesn’t know if he wants Elpis to really work or not. What would it mean for her if it doesn’t? If she’s just some broken doll that can see without her eyes?
Would the DSO let her go? Would they sign off on his request to take her home? Possibly, but they’ll always want to keep an eye on Grace, and run more experiments—the ugly kind. They never did let Sherry go. Not truly, and Grace is a much tastier morsel. Too delectable to resist, he thinks.
The coughing fit gets him out of nowhere. He hadn’t even taken a hit but he drops to the ground with the force of his body deciding to betray him. He feels the hot gurgle of blood up his throat and splatter against the floor. The room sways, moves like the swirl of milk against his morning coffee. Sounds disappear, then return in a muffle. Tinnitus in his ears, then, getting louder and louder, while screams and moans come to him from behind a sponge. Somewhere in there he recognises the sound of Grace’s pleading. From that three minute video, he thinks. Just like it.
He sees the teeth come at him from the right, knows that they’ll get him, knows it, accepts it, almost feels it. Feels the air around him swish, then snap. He hears her in his head before he hears her properly, with his ears.
“STOP. PLEASE STOP.”
Everything in the room freezes. As if the air itself was asked not to move. The word burns through his skull, makes him drop his gun, makes all the infected around him collapse down on the floor. Then, nothing. No movement. They stop. They all stop.
The lights turn back on. The wailing of the siren is shut off. The door behind Grace opens, and two of the security agents come in and drag her out while Leon just stands in place. Frozen, while her voice still keeps rising around his skull.
*
She’s in the straitjacket again when he unlocks himself from the scene of his crimes to come find her. She’s been crying. The med staff have left her on her bed, and when he approaches she shrieks.
“D-Don’t touch me!” She shuffles back. Or, tries to.
He frowns. “You wanna stay in that thing?”
She's hiccupping, like she can't get enough air. Eyes downcast. He doesn’t understand Grace Ashcroft. She wasn’t in any real danger. She must know that. He saw the CCTV footage of the care centre from the day of his infiltration. When the infected breached the room she was in, they tore through everyone in the room except her. Didn’t even bother coming close to her. Now the question was whether they considered her one of them, or if she controlled them into leaving her alone.
He approaches her slowly like a wounded animal and he’s always been nothing but a predator, maw dripping in blood. He’s kind about taking the straps off her, and disentangling the sleeves around her body. He doesn’t linger, doesn’t touch her any more than he needs to but she shakes and shivers like a deer caught under the jaw of a rabid beast.
She runs off to the corner of the room just as soon as she’s free.
“I-I trusted you!”
Fool, he wants to say. He wants to bite it into her skin to make a statement. Instead he says, “You weren’t in danger.”
“I don’t care about that!” she yells. It’s the first time he’s heard her raise her voice.
“What’s the problem, then?”
“You g-gave up!” she says. “I saw you. I saw—you would have let them bite you. You weren’t even trying to—”
He shrugs. “So?”
“SO, you were going to make me watch. You were going to let them tear you up and make me watch!” Like her mother, he knows. He had always known, but didn’t really want to think about that too hard. The right pressure points, and all he can hear ringing in his head is her sweet little voice saying that he’s all she has.
“You stopped them, though,” he tells her.
She shakes her head. “I didn’t know. I-I didn’t know I-I could do that. It’s never worked, before, when Victor made me try.”
She didn’t have anything to lose back then. Fuck them both that it has to be him now. A dying, broken, old dog.
“I-I can’t do this,” she says. “I can’t do it a-again. I won’t.”
He catches her before her fingertips can touch his gun. He holds her by the hair and pulls her back. She struggles but it’s not that difficult for him to restrain her. He makes sure to cradle her head so that it doesn’t slam against the wall as he pins her.
“This is getting old,” he tells her.
“I have nothing,” she tells him. “I have n-nothing.”
And no one. Except him, and he’s a dying man anyway, and she must know that. He knows she can feel his infection, throbbing in his veins, rotting him from the inside. He notices now that she has a small trickle of blood on the corner of her mouth. Was it Elpis taking too much from her, or did she bite her lip hard enough to draw blood?
“You really wanna die?” he says. An observation. He takes the gun out of its holster and places it delicately against her chin. She nods, a little desperately. He brings it lower, glides it down, down, down against her, past her throat, past the valley of her breasts, past the smooth planes of her stomach and rests it against the waistband of her pants.
He pauses there for a moment, to make her think that no, he won’t go there before he pushes against the taut strings and finally brings the cold metal tip at a rest against her clothed cunt.
“You have to earn it.” he tells her.
She swallows a gasp between her teeth. He watches her eyes widen, hands shake under his grasp, and that wet mouth of hers open. A wince next as he pushes the gun closer to her clit.
He thinks of everything that Ada taught him, all those years on her leash and he thinks yeah, he gets it now. Grace is already so broken, and it would be so easy to break her some more. She’ll behave, he knows, for him, if he asks, if he plays this right.
And hopefully he’ll die before he catches any real feelings.
Yeah, yeah. It’s not the best course of action, but it will be the easiest. Whatever the fallout, he won’t be around to deal with it. Not his circus, not his rabbit.
“Please,” she begs. For death, but instead he bends down and kisses her.
He tries to be soft. For her. But he has a gun pressed to her, and her tongue ignites his very bones. He licks off her blood, swallows, comes back for more. She’s sweeter than he imagined. All soft skin, and inexperienced swipes of her tongue as if she’s never been kissed before. He wants to bite down, bite so hard into her it leaves a mark long after he’s gone, just sink into her and stay there, growl if anyone tries to pry him off.
“I’ll consider it,” he tells her against her lips. “Still have a few weeks left before the infection takes over. You should stick around till then.”
She nods, or tries to but his hand is still around her neck. “If you behave,” he continues. “Maybe we can both get what we want.”
He removes the gun, removes his hands, and takes an unsteady step back. She remains by the wall and he admires the shaken, red form of her there for a moment before turning around and leaving.
“See you tomorrow,” he says by the door.
It’s only in the morning, the next day, after a long, hot shower, that Leon sees his reflection in the foggy mirror and realises that the infection has crawled away from his face, and back down his shoulders where it was before, two weeks ago.