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There is no funeral for Luis Serra Navarro. The man fades away into irrelevance. Just another name on the hauntingly long list of those who perished in the disaster which befell the quaint, rural little town of Valdelobos. There is no funeral for Luis, just as there is none for Méndez, or Salazar, or even Saddler.
There is a funeral for Mike. Another for Krauser. Leon even hears of ones for the Spanish officers who lost their lives; Mario and the fresh-faced newbie Leon never learnt the name of.
He doesn’t attend any of them, not that he was invited in the first place.
Irrelevance is something Leon and Luis seem to share in common. Names to be forgotten once they are long gone. Impacts upon this world to be swept away like specks of dust by the cruel palms of the wind.
Leon doesn’t fear being forgotten, not like he thinks Luis must have. He knows his worth is limited and his role readily replaceable. He knows there are few people who will grieve for him once his wretched little body finally decays beneath him. It doesn’t scare him. Being forgotten has never scared him, because he’s never had the chance to familiarise himself with the sensation of being remembered.
He’s not scared of being forgotten, but Luis had been. Perhaps that is why Leon keeps the key to his laboratory and the photograph of his Umbrella days. Both silly mementos, their relevant uses long since expired. The laboratory back on the island is razed to nothing but rubble and ash. The faces in this photograph are nothing but ghosts.
Still, Leon clings to it with stubborn, dogged determination. He runs his thumb along the key’s grooves and indentations and pictures nimble, calloused fingers. If he closes his eyes and inhales, sometimes he can find the phantom of nicotine and ash at the back of his nose.
A hand clasped within his own, the warmth and strength lending it life rapidly waning. He’d held that hand and fought down the lump in his throat. He’d held that hand and tried to spit out the words which died before they could pass his tongue. He’d held that hand until everything which had made it his was gone. Ebbed out of his body along with the stark, scarlet pools of blood.
The photograph had never been his to take, but Leon has never claimed to be a selfless man. As his eyes rove over the faces in the tattered picture, they always linger for far too long on one familiar, grinning face. He’d been so young. So full of hope. There were no creases around his eyes and no lines weathering his forehead. His hair had been a tad shorter and his eyes had seemed to burn brighter. A silvery sort of platinum, rather than the cool stone-grey Leon had come to know.
It’s only been a month since Valdelobos, and Leon wonders if they truly had been that shade of grey, or whether he can already no longer trust his own mind. Surely someone’s eyes cannot alter that much within a decade? Surely the perils of life had not truly stripped the spark from Luis’ soul in such a starkly tangible way?
Leon knows the older, wiser version of Luis he had met had not possessed these eyes. He knows they were grey rather than silver. He knows it in his bones.
He also knows that, given time, he will come to forget this fact. There will come a day when Leon lets his eyes roam across the planes of this photograph and finds no discrepancies. He knows there will come a day, give it weeks, or months, or years, where he looks into those silver irises and believes they had always been that hypnotic shade.
He prefers his version of Luis. Tired and battered and bruised. Exhausted and broken and haunted. Snarky and persistent and stubborn. Kind and intelligent and beyond all else, brave. One of the bravest men Leon had come to know.
The version of Luis with the washed out eyes had been brave enough to try again and again no matter how hard the world kicked him down. He had finally planted his feet firmly and refused to run. It was what allowed the dagger to slip so seamlessly into his spine.
Leon knows he can’t cling to this ghost as tightly as he’d like, but for Luis, he will try.
The man deserved a funeral.
The man deserved a thank you.
The man deserved a legacy.
Leon is a pretty shitty consolation prize, but he’s the best the man is going to get.
***
The years pass and Leon does, indeed, forget.
The smooth, lyrical cadence of Luis’ voice. The exact curl and bounce of dark locks framing a sharp jaw and neck. The number and placement of rings adorning long, nimble fingers.
Never the eyes. Grey not silver. Never the eyes.
Leon forgets a lot, despite how stubbornly he attempts to cling to it all.
Many people come into his life.
Just as many people leave.
He’s never been able to keep people, so it’s nothing new to him. It doesn’t mean that the sting eases. It doesn’t mean that the weak little flutter of hope inside his chest never again spreads its battered wings.
He gets to see Sherry and Claire again, which is nice. They’re exactly as he remembers them, and yet, completely different. It leaves him feeling disconcerted and off-kilter. It tends to the caged bird of hope which resides within his ribcage. He wonders how long it will be until the small beast struggles too hard and snaps its neck on the ribbed rungs of its prison.
Leon doesn’t get to keep people, so he knows this too, shall pass.
Despite all the people who come and go, none ever again seem to affect him quite as Luis did. It’s strange, the impact the man had on him. They’d known each other for barely a day, and over half of that was with a tense air of distrust, courtesy of Leon, thrown up between them.
The Spanish researcher had gotten on his nerves and frustrated him to hell and back. He’d also seemed to be one of the very few people to actually catch a glimpse of Leon beneath the cracks of his facade.
Leon had known him for barely a day, and yet he seems to miss him like no one else.
With everyone else, apart from Sherry, the ache had eased with time. His memories had granted him a semblance of peace. He could let his mind wander, and the recollections brought forth hurt his heart with a bittersweet bite.
Not with Luis.
Luis still hurts.
Luis always hurts.
He thinks it’s because so much went unsaid between the two of them. He thinks it’s because he never did get to spew those sticky thick, choking words up out of his guts in time. He’d held Luis’ hand and watched the light fade from his eyes. Only after he was gone had he managed to tell him how he’d believed in him. His Don Quixote.
He reads the book after Luis is gone. A lengthy tale of adventures and tomfoolery. Leon can understand why Luis had been so fond of it. Can see how the humour had influenced the other man’s own sharp wit and cheek.
He can also see the tragic irony of it all. Don Quixote, a delusional man set off on a futile quest. He had been destined for failure since the very beginning, and just as with Luis, he had lost his idealism in the end.
Don Quixote had died with his beliefs of grandeur shattered.
He had died scared.
He had died knowing that he was, and had always been, a fool.
Leon wishes, more than anything, that he had said something.
If nothing else, Luis had deserved to die with the knowledge that he’d played the hero of the story. He hadn’t deserved to die in a sick mimicry of how Don Quixote himself had.
***
The years continue to drag on despite how Leon struggles against the tug of their tides. They continue to drag on, cruel and relentlessly devoid of mercy. They continue to drag on, until he is truly broken down into nothing.
He had thought an age ago that the bright, blue-eyed rookie cop had died in Raccoon City. However, he had always been wrong.
Leon hadn’t realised just how long that scrappy kid had clung to him. A burr. A tumour. A stained splotch of blood which never quite washes clean.
The kid had kept the dove of hope fed inside of Leon’s chest.
The kid and dove are both dead now. They’ve long since drowned and rotted, along with his heart.
He hopes his liver will be the next to join them. Hopes that one day, when he closes his eyes and passes out with his flushed forehead pressed into the grainy, sticky table, that he won’t wake back up.
Leon just wants to give up. He’s so tired. So exhausted. He wants to stop hurting, but the world is always breaking. It’s always breaking, and as long as he’s here, he should at least try to bludgeon it back together. He hates it, but it’s all he’s good for. All he’s worth.
It doesn’t mean that, as he presses that bottle to his lips, his vision doesn’t swim with the afterimages of a sharp toothed grin and honeyed gaze.
Even after all these years, the ghost of his knight still watches over him.
He doesn’t think he remembers his eyes quite right.
***
Leon looks in the mirror.
The man that stares back is unrecognisable.
Sunken cheekbones and pale, clammy skin. Bloodshot eyes and dark, heavy bags beneath which seem to further sap any remaining spark from the faded blue irises. He looks like he’s lived through hell, and with a sardonic sense of amusement, he figures he has. He’s lived through hell enough times now to long have lost count.
His shaky hand comes up to trail along the scar diagonally bisecting his chest. It’s jagged and raised, despite all these years. The sensation of it dragging against the pads of his fingers is a familiar one. Numbed tissue which he can no longer feel. It’s protectively nestled over his chest cavity, sheltering the precious organs within.
As he presses his nail down into it, he can feel the phantom stirrings of something crawling beneath his skin. Writhing and twisted. It drags wicked little talons along the underside of his sternum and wraps barbed tendrils around his ribs. It tugs and it tears. It shreds and it snags. He feels his ribs being slowly, excruciatingly pried apart. He feels his malleable lungs squish and buckle. He feels his heart thrash desperately in an attempt to escape the expanding pressure.
Had Luis felt like this too? Had the plaga also butchered and displaced his innards? Leon had been offered the courtesy of companionship in suffering. He’d had Ashley by his side, experiencing the same horrors.
How alone had Luis been? How scared had he been?
Had anyone held his hand as he screamed and writhed in that cold, stiff medical chair? Or had he been forced to strap himself down beforehand in preparation?
How desperate had Luis been? How impossibly, agonisingly despairing did a man have to be to inflict such horrors upon himself? Had he even known the machine would work, or had he accepted a reality in which it killed him?
Despite the hope he carried upon his heavy shoulders, something in Luis’ eyes had always suggested he knew Valdelobos would be his tomb.
“Don’t remember giving you that scar, Rookie”
Leon feels his spine stiffen. His nails bite into his skin as his fingers automatically clench into a fist. Despite feeling the eyes boring holes into his exposed back, he doesn’t raise his gaze to look.
“It’s because you didn’t,” he bites out, then leans over to pick up his discarded shirt. He tugs it over his head with stiff, mechanical movements. “Most of these aren’t from you actually, you egotistical bastard. Life goes on,” Leon pauses, aware that he’s being petty and stupid right now but unable to resist it, “well, for me it did, anyway.”
There’s a gruff, mocking snort from over Leon’s shoulder. He feels a gust of hot breath against his exposed neck. It sets the hairs up on end. “Still got a mouth on you,” the voice rumbles as fingers brush along the base of Leon’s spine, “good. Always liked your mouth, pretty boy.”
Leon closes his eyes and breathes in deeply. “Go away, Jack.”
The fingers trail up until they reach the space below his shoulder blades. They dig in, sharp needles of pain directly between the T4 and T5 vertebrae of his spine. “Too slow, Rookie. Always too damn slow.”
When Leon turns to look, Krauser is already gone.
He lets his head slam down into the mirror and doesn’t particularly care whether the loud, audible crack is from the glass or his skull.
***
He can’t find the photograph.
Leon can’t find the photograph and he can’t breathe.
Fingers squeeze his lungs. Choking, smothering, crushing. They squeeze and they wring the wretched, fragile little organs until he’s left gasping and spluttering. They squeeze and they squeeze and they squeeze until darkness blots his vision and the phantom taste of iron lathers the back of his tongue.
Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, inhale, inhale, inhale- he can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.
The gasps tear out of his chest so violently he can hear the rattle to his chest over the roaring rush of blood in his ears.
Inhale, inhale, inhale, inhale- Leon drops his head between his legs and curls up as tightly as he can. He fists his hands in his hair and pulls. He bites at his lip until real, authentic blood gushes through his mouth like a wave.
He throws himself forward onto his hands and knees and throws up. The sharp, acidic bite of bile burns a pathway up his throat and through his nose. He chokes on it. Splutters and coughs until it spews forth from his lips as a viscous splatter.
It’s a shimmery, clear puddle which reeks of something pungent and sharp. His stomach clenches pitifully around emptiness and he heaves again until his abdominal muscles ache with agony.
He can’t find the photograph.
He can’t remember Luis’ eyes.
***
“You let him die.”
Leon’s head snaps up at the deep, strongly accented voice. Mismatched, hazy eyes greet his own. One flesh, one glass.
“Huh, haven’t had you before,” Leon greets gruffly, then turns his back on the judgemental gaze. “Glad you lost the stupid hat.”
There’s the heavy thunk of weighted boots against the floor and the audible shuffle of a long, leather coat as the man presumably follows after Leon. “You let him die.”
Leon feels his lip curl, barely resisting the urge to spin around and throw a fist at the ghost. “No. You let him die.”
The air is tense and silent for several, long moments. Then, “you were supposed to help us. Help him. You were the intended salvation.”
Leon slams his fist down upon the tabletop and watches dispassionately as a furious swarm of paperwork and files scatter to the floor beneath his ire. “You welcomed the cult in! You!” Leon whirls around, finger pointed as he snarls directly into Méndez’s face. “You killed him!”
The older man’s face looks unbearably sad. “I did love him.”
“Bullshit!”
“I did,” he insists, and his voice rings throughout the room with nothing but hoarse honesty, “I did. He was once like a son to me.”
Leon grabs a bottle off the table and hurls it at Méndez’s head, but the spectre is gone before it can hit him. It smashes miserably against the hardwood floor and shatters into an arc of shimmering, gem-like grains and amber liquid.
Leon drops to the floor and clutches at his head.
Dapple the donkey and Rocinante the horse clumsily prance through his mind for the remainder of the day.
***
Leon knows he isn’t making it out of this one.
His legs buckle beneath him and he topples forward, barely possessing the air required for a strained cry to tear through his lips. He manages to pull himself up on trembling arms. Manages to drag himself forward enough until he can prop his back up against the cold, crumbled stone.
There’s a wet, glistening red streak left behind him. He can feel his abdomen pulsate and then there’s a splatter of more warmth against his hands. It coats them thick and slick. It coats them until the fluid begins to leak out around the digits he has clawed into the wound in a futile attempt to clamp it shut.
There’s so much blood. So much blood, and he’s starting to feel cold. It’s not as terrifying as it should be. A numbing, calming sort of sensation, despite how brutally awful it also is. Knives in his skin, glass in his flesh, teeth in his tendons. Sharp, sharp, burning. It hurts so terribly. So white hot and consuming he can barely think.
Leon lets his head thud back against the wall and gasps. He tries to bring a stiff leg upwards and curl in on himself, but the limb won’t respond. His vision is starting to haze out around the corners and there’s an incessant buzzing to his ears which seems to drown out the world.
He’s not scared, but it hurts. He’s not scared, but it’s awful. He’s not scared, but he’s so, so fucking lonely.
As his eyes slip shut, he swears he can feel the solid warmth of another hand within his own.
***
“Hola, Sancho.”
Leon recognises that voice. No matter the years, nor the distance. No matter whether steeped in reality or illusion. He knows that voice like he knows his own bones.
“Don Quixote,” he croaks, voice hoarse and brittle, as if his throat has been rubbed raw by sandpaper, “it’s been a long time.”
There’s an odd hitch to the voice as it continues to speak, “Sí… sí it has.” Leon can feel narrow, calloused fingers prod up beneath his jaw. They press into his carotid artery, pressure sure and firm. “I’ll admit I uh- I expected a stronger reaction, amigo mío.”
Leon doesn’t want to open his eyes. If he opens his eyes, he’ll be sure to notice all the ways in which this hallucination fails. Its smile will be too restrained, not demonstrating the glint of sharp canines. Its nose will slope too sharply and its hair won’t curl around its ears correctly.
Its eyes will be silver.
He’s not even sure if those features he can recall are authentic, or just another way in which his mind fails him.
Were Luis’ eyes silver or grey? Had they ever looked at him with such a heavy, lidded gaze? Leon likes to think he has the memory branded to himself, but he knows logically he does not. Time fades all. Even that which the mind desperately wished it did not.
“Olvídalo,” the ghost mutters, sounding oddly disappointed, “I stitched you up, yanqui, but you still need-”
A sharp, barking laugh erupts from Leon’s throat. It tugs at his tender abdomen, causing it to scream with a piercing flare of agony. Once he catches his breath, he wheezes out another cynical little laugh. “Yeah, alright, sure. You stitched me up.”
“¿Qué?” it sounds offended, sounds hurt, “you think I wouldn’t?”
Leon’s throat is thick. His tongue attempts to glue itself to the inside of his mouth, refusing to form the words. His eyes are still clenched shut, but he can feel them prickle and itch with tears despite that. “You’re dead. Luis died- my Luis died over ten years ago.”
The fingers still pressed into his throat twitch, “ay, you think…” The voice trails off numbly, but then the hand is smoothing up Leon’s jaw until it comes to cup the side of his face. “Open your eyes, por favor, querido.”
Leon doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to because it won’t be his Luis. He doesn’t want to, but a thumb comes up to smooth just beneath his eye. The gesture is so unbearably tender that it drags a sobbing gasp out of him. It won’t be his Luis, but he cracks his eyes open anyway.
He’s right. It’s not his Luis.
The face which stares down at him is lined with additional years around the corners of the eyes and mouth. The rich, dark brown curls are longer than Leon recalls and they are now streaked through with grey behind the ears. The stubble around that sharp jaw is thicker, and when his lips draw up into a smile, it is a sad, wobbly thing.
The eyes, however, are a soft and stormy grey.
That feels right, somehow.
“I’m glad it's you.”
“Perdón?”
“I’m glad it's you. I’m glad you’re the one I get to see as I die.”
This version of Luis also fails to replicate the authentic thing because it appears to be speechless. It raises a hand which trembles, fingers still adorned in rings, and scrubs at its eyes. The familiar, deep red jacket emblazoned with hypnotically golden patterns is absent.
This Luis is wearing something far too plain and boring. A dressy white shirt, unbuttoned invitingly low in order to expose sharp collarbones and the beginning swathe of a haired chest. The sleeves are rolled up to the elbows, but despite this, they’re still drenched in blood. As if they were only tucked up and into safety’s reach after Leon’s sickly blood had been permitted to taint them.
Leon is very disappointed upon the realisation that his brain has also failed to recreate the peppy, rumbling baritone of Luis’ voice. This one is choked too thickly with emotion as it speaks. “You’re not dying, Sancho. I promise you.”
He couldn’t not be dying, his brain had never allowed him this small mercy before. “I am. I never get nice hallucinations.” His voice catches roughly, but he forces it out, like he should have done all those years ago. “I never get to see you. I missed you.”
“Ay, Leon…” the wrong version of Luis whispers, and even if it’s not him, he says Leon’s name in almost the same way. The hitch to it and the long, melodic drag over the vowels. It’s so reminiscent of how it was murmured in those dank, decrepit mines. The fact Leon can so vividly recall the sound of it, even after a decade, makes something in his chest squeeze. “I should have- I should have found you sooner. I didn’t think- I’m not pardoned and I thought- I didn’t think…”
Didn’t think Leon would care?
Didn’t think Leon would protect him?
Didn’t think Leon would miss him?
He doesn’t receive an answer, but it doesn’t matter.
For someone who was so certain that he didn’t fear death, Leon’s voice cracks an embarrassing amount. “Stay with me?” Luis is silent. “Just hold my hand?” Don’t go. Don’t go again. “Like I did for you?” Don’t leave him. Don’t leave him again. “Please?” Please, please, please-
The hand which takes Leon’s own is shaking, but it is warm.
It holds him until he slips away.
He likes to imagine it holds him after that, too.
***
Leon does not believe in an afterlife.
The universe is mercilessly cruel, so surely that is proof enough no God exists?
If one did, the atrocities enabled by the world would cease to exist.
If one did, there would have been no purpose to Leon’s existence.
If one did, Leon could have given up long, long ago.
There is no God and thus, no afterlife either. People die and they simply fade to dust. They die and unless their memory is carried around like a waning torch, then they too, cease to exist. Leon is not expecting anyone to tend to the pitiful scrap of flame he’ll leave behind.
He expects that tiny glimmer of red to sputter and die out completely. He knows wind will wick up the ashes and carry him away until he is dispersed so fully across the earth that not a shred of his original self remains.
So why, then, does he wake up with the tinder still smouldering? He can feel his wretched little heart thrash about inside his chest. It dances across the skeletal remains of that pitiful, caged dove he hasn’t caught sight of in years.
His breaths drag out of him, harried and gasping. It carries with it the waft of cheap laundry soap and the burn of artificial, lavender air freshener. The stench of a cheap motel.
Leon feels his stomach roll and leans over to heave. Pain lances his abdomen so fierce and blinding that it tears a cry from him.
“Leon?” The voice is worried, and within a few scant moments, flurried hands land on his side. They flutter about indecisively until eventually deciding to gently guide him back down onto the scratchy linens. “Oye, easy cowboy! You’re still hurt bad.”
Leon can’t do this. He can’t do this.
He’d mistaken this hallucination for a blessing. One final kindness granted from his rotten little mind. However, it had never been that, had it? This was just another way to torture him. Another way to cruelly remind him of his past failings and regrets.
He’d thought he was going to be allowed to die by Luis’ side. Instead, he’s stuck living in madness with a dead man’s ghost in his ear.
“When will I die, Luis?”
The hands flinch away. The voice stutters as it speaks. “Not anytime soon, Sancho. We’ve just found each other again, eh? That would be a waste.”
“I’m delirious. Blood loss or fever will do that. Not that I ever needed those to go crazy before,” Leon pauses to laugh. It’s a wet, phlegmy sort of sound. “You’re not real. Just a nice dream.”
“Please look at me, cariño. I promise I’m real.”
Leon feels his lip curl as he continues stubbornly refusing to open his eyes. “You’re not. And my Luis never called me that.”
The silence stretches on for so long that Leon thinks the phantom must have listened and dissipated. He’s tempted to open his eyes and check, but that would mean confronting that Luis is gone. He doesn’t want Luis to be gone. Even if this is just a fantasy, Leon wishes to keep dreaming for a while longer.
The relief crashes over him like a wave when that familiar, lilting voice finally shatters the tension strumming the air. “Here, water. Please drink it.”
Leon does. He needs assistance to prop himself upright and press the glass to his lips because his entire body still feels disconnected and sluggish. The strong, narrow fingers which clasp beneath his jaw and tilt his head back hold him gently. Leon takes longer to drink than he would ordinarily need to, simply because he wishes for them to linger there.
The water is lukewarm and tastes oddly sticky. Sharp and tacky with chlorine. It’s such a niche, oddly specific detail for his mind to include in this sweetened daydream of a world.
“Thank you.”
“De nada.”
Leon knows he’s not real, but he doesn’t want to be alone. He had been truthful when he told the phantom that he’d missed him. If he’s actively dying, then what's the harm in indulging in this comfort? It could take a man days to succumb to infection depending on the environmental conditions. It’s not real. This Luis isn’t real, but it’s all Leon is ever going to get. It’s not real, but Leon can pretend. His life has been so shitty that he deserves to believe in this once off fairytale.
He can play the role of Don Quixote for a few precious moments.
“I kept your photograph.”
“My photograph?”
“Yeah. The one of you and your Umbrella lab team.”
Luis’ voice is hitched wrongly again. “Why would you keep that? I know- I looked into you, afterwards, Sancho. I know you were in Raccoon City. I know what I did to you.”
“It’s okay. I forgave you.”
“You shouldn’t have. I ruined your life-“
“You didn’t ruin it. Fucked me up further, sure, but I’ve never been right. No normal kid thinks about killing himself that much.” There is silence; so Leon runs his tongue over his teeth, tasting the stagnant saliva and what is no doubt terrible breath.
There’s a sort of soft, fuzzy sensation buzzing around the inside of his head and behind his eyes. Codeine? Morphine? It’s nice of his brain to provide him pain relief. What a stupid, self-indulgent fantasy this is shaping up to be.
“Your eyes are wrong in that photo.” Luis makes a questioning noise in the back of his throat, and so Leon hurries to clarify for him. He hasn’t seen the photograph in years, but he’s sure he’s right about this one detail. Sure his memory hasn’t failed him here. “They’re too… bright. Not the real colour.”
“Probably the uh- the LED lighting those labs used. It was very harsh.”
Leon hums a small confirmation, and then with a nauseous swoop to his stomach, outstretches a hand. “Can I touch you?”
Please don’t leave.
Please let him play pretend.
Please let him have this, just for a little while longer.
“I just- I haven’t- I lost both you and Jack at the same time and I’ve never- nobody else I’ve cared- I just want to-”
“Shhh,” Luis soothes, before a hand clasps and squeezes his own. There’s the creak of springs and the mattress dips beneath Leon’s back as further weight settles atop it. The body which settles in at Leon’s side is warm and solid. It smells like nicotine and something vaguely spiced. Cedar? Cinnamon? Sandalwood? None of those names seem to fit the scent, even if it is a vaguely familiar one. “I’m here. I’ve got you, principito.”
Leon shudders. Despite how it sends sharp, shooting pain arcing through his abdomen, he rolls into the body beside him and pulls it closer. Face buried into a stubbled throat and hands clinging desperately to a broad expanse of back. There’s a chin tucked over the top of Leon’s head, and as he inhales deeply, his lungs fill with smoke and a pulse races beneath his lips.
He feels safe. Feels cared for, as impossible as that reality is. There are ringed fingers carding gently through his hair and the murmur of soft, comforting Spanish at the crown of his head. Whispered words of apologies and promises impossible for the likes of a ghost to keep. Leon allows his eyes to slide shut and loses himself to the hymn of them.
“I killed him, you know. For you.” Leon confesses quietly. His knuckles come up to brush over the rungs of Luis’ spine. They press in between the T4 and T5 vertebrae, gentle and lingering in their pressure. Despite the touch being featherlight, the other man shivers. “I killed him. With the same knife.”
“Krauser?”
Leon feels his voice crack, “it’s not fair that I see him. I see him all the time, but I never see you,” and then the dam breaks. He curls himself tighter around the other body and sobs. “It’s never you. I wish it was you.”
He cries himself until his throat is screaming. He cries himself until his eyes are bloodshot and gooey with it. He cries himself until he surely has nothing left in his body to expel.
He cries himself to sleep, and through it all, Luis holds him as if he is something precious.
***
Leon wakes up and he feels like complete and utter hell. His head is absolutely throbbing as if it will detonate imminently. His stomach clenches in on itself and all he can taste is the acidic burn of bile. Each twitch of his aching muscles shoot off rapidfire starbursts of agony within his stomach.
He feels like the absolute definition of a dead man walking.
That’s how he knows he’s, somehow, miraculously, still alive.
He’s also entirely alone.
The bedsheets next to him are cold as he smooths a palm over them and only the stench of overpowering lavender prevails. The room is dimly lit in a dull, artificial yellow glow. The overhead lights flicker and buzz faintly, lending a repetitive background melody to the fiercer roar of cars and lively chatter outside.
Leon drags his hands across his face and feels the thick, puffy swelling of his eyelids. The telltale sign that he’s been crying. He’s certain he cried his heart out yesterday, but somehow, the urge to do so again lingers there like a burr. He struggles to swallow around the prickly shape of it.
He doesn’t know why it hurts so terribly. He’d known since the very start that the illusion wasn’t real.
That caged bird within a prison of ribs had still trilled pathetically, all the same. He feels terribly sorry for it. How cruel to throw the beast a scrap of food only to immediately go back to starving it.
Yanking the covers off his legs, Leon attempts to ease himself up and out of the bed. It’s slow going and he’s left a shaking, panting mess, but he manages. Grip white-knuckled on the bedside table and teeth grit, he forces himself to his quaking legs.
How did he get here? It appears to be a cheap motel room of some sort. There’s a single bed, clearly slept in by himself, and not much else adorning the scarcely decorated room. Peeling, cream paint and frayed, grey carpets. There’s the yellowed stain of cigarette smoke clinging to the walls and a suspiciously sticky looking stain upon the linoleum, kitchenette flooring.
Leon hobbles his way into that kitchen and flicks the cold water tap on. The drains rattle and squeal in protest. Water begins to bubble and leak out of the base of the tap. He ignores it, instead scrabbling for a random glass he sights on the countertop and jamming it beneath the faucet.
The water burns going down his throat. Tepid and tainted thickly with chlorine. Leon gags as his stomach recoils violently. How long has he been out of it? Surely a few days, at the very least. He wouldn’t be having withdrawals otherwise.
The little bar fridge has absolutely nothing in it. Leon feels his eyebrows tick up at that. Usually they have a few cheap beers, if nothing else.
The sudden click of a lock at the door has Leon whirling. The rapid movement almost sends him stumbling to his knees. The white-hot fury lancing his stomach causes him to stumble and he clips the side of the countertop with his hip hard.
Where are his guns? His knives? He should still have his equipment on him, he hadn’t undressed- Leon’s brain grinds to a halt.
Why is he shirtless?
What the fuck?
It should be the least of his priorities right now, but Leon finds his hands scrabbling at the thick wadding of bandages wound tightly around his abdomen. He claws them apart and then feels his hands begin to shake fiercer at what he discovers beneath.
He’s been practically gutted, but he’d been aware of that fact already. What pulls him up short are the rows upon rows of neat, precise stitches.
Somebody else had stitched Leon up. There was no way in hell he had managed such neat lines, especially if delirious with blood loss.
As the door swings open and Leon’s eyes shoot up, he feels his heart plummet into his stomach.
“Fuck. I really have gone crazy this time.”
Luis’ hopeful expression falls into devastation. However, the mask of confidence is quick to slide back into place this time. He cocks a hip, leaning back into the doorframe as he twirls the motel keys on a finger. “No crazier than usual, Sancho.”
Leon allows his eyes to rove over the other man. Slow, languid, and exploratory.
He’s wearing a jacket today, similar in style to the one he donned back in Valdelobos, but still distinctly foreign. This one is a deeper, richer maroon in colouration with studded sleeves and shoulders. It tapers around his waist nicely, accentuating the dips above his hips.
Dark jeans, boots, and white undershirt. His longer hair is pulled up off the back of his neck into a ponytail and the stubble adorning his jaw and throat still seems scruffy and wild, even with an attempt clearly having been made to tame it.
He carries himself with a slightly altered gait to what Leon remembers. Less swagger and saunter to the hips. The cane clutched in the hand not currently toying with the keys suggests a mobility injury is to blame for that. The stab wound to the spine?
Leon feels his mouth go dry as his breath catches. This may not be his Luis, sporting an additional decade of years, but he’s still undeniably one of the most attractive men Leon has seen.
“If I were sane, you wouldn’t be here.”
Luis heaves a sigh, then turns to lock the door behind him. He’s muttering something darkly beneath his lips in Spanish as he crosses the room. “You shouldn’t be up,” he grouches, hesitating for a brief second before he reaches out to gently take Leon’s wrist. “Please, come sit.”
Leon obliges him. He allows himself to be guided over to the dingy little dining table and eased down into one of the stiff, wooden seats. Luis releases his wrist and makes to straighten back upright.
In a moment of idiotic and purely indulgent weakness, Leon grabs him by the collar of his new jacket and pulls him back down.
Their lips meet and Leon allows his eyes to slip shut. Rough, scratchy stubble scrapes along his jaw and a large, elegant nose bumps into his own. Leon tilts his face, angling it so that they can slot better together. He runs his tongue along Luis’ bottom lip as the other man gasps and relishes the taste of coffee and cigarettes lingering in his mouth.
A firm hand upon his chest pushes Leon back and their mouths part. He can’t help but blink up, eyes probably bleary and hazy. “Why’d we stop?”
“You think I’m not real, cariño,” Luis murmurs softly. He leans in, briefly bumping their foreheads together. “Kiss me again when you’re convinced that I am, hm?”
Leon feels his face pull into a scowl. “What if I don’t want to return to reality?” he asks, because that would mean letting go of this. Would mean letting go of him again.
“Then it would be my turn to suffer a broken heart, mi corazón.” Luis extracts himself from Leon’s grip and kicks a seat out beside Leon. As he slumps into the chair, he raps something against the tabletop playfully before sliding the object over to Leon.
It’s his communicator.
Luis’ voice is plain as he states, “call in.”
Leon isn’t sure why he hesitates. The air feels weirdly charged, as if the universe is currently holding its breath. Outside, car horns continue to blare and birdsong continues to ring out. People continue to chatter and laugh and argue. However, within this little room, a box of musty, stagnant air and stale carpets, Leon only hears the flutter of a dove’s wings.
His fingers tremble as he inputs the password and scans his thumbprint. It only takes one ring for Hunnigan to pick up.
“Agent Kenne- Leon? Leon! Are you there? Come in.”
Leon’s voice sounds wobbly and threadbare, even to his own ears. “Hi, Hunnigan. I’m alive.” The woman on the other end of the line bursts into a furious slurry of words, but Leon can scarcely hear them. Luis is leant across the table, a fist propping his head up by the cheek. His eyes haven’t flickered away from Leon’s face for a single second. “Can you- can you do me a favour?”
She’s pissed, and he’s going to owe her one hell of an explanation later, but she’s also a goddamn angel. “You owe me, Leon. What is it?”
“Can you-” god, his throat is so thick. His hand trembles where it’s gripping the communicator harshly enough to cause it to creak beneath the pressure. When he blinks, he can feel them itch and blur wetly. “Can you hear anyone else in the room with me?”
“Leon, I don’t understand-”
“Hola, señora jefa,” Luis chirps, his stormy grey eyes absolutely dancing, “how are you today?”
The line is dead silent for several excruciatingly long seconds, and then, “I am… well, thank you. Who is this? Are you assisting Agent Kennedy?”
The comm clatters to the ground with a furious beep as Leon ends the call and hurls it aside. He practically throws himself across the table, and his Luis laughs, open-mouthed and delighted, into Leon’s own.