Chapter Text
His hand is warm. Through all of it, all the noise, and buzz, and the hurt; it’s warm like the cup of tea he made for Grace that morning. Not cold like the way he speaks to Agent Hunnigan, not cold like the tip of his knife, or the muzzle of his gun.
He keeps swiping his thumb across the back of her hand, as if they’re in her glass room, and she’s being prepped for a blood test, not a field one. Maybe that’s what makes Grace ache more. That he’s back to acting all nice for her. As if he didn’t take her biggest fear and turn the blunt edge of it against her neck.
She wants to be angry at him but all she has is hurt and anger for herself. That she still likes him, that she still wants his hand on hers, and that it comforts her like nothing else, no one else. It makes her feel more pathetic, more stupid, more sick than she already thinks she is. Is there no line that he will cross that she will not immediately redraw at a different location, pretending he’s done nothing wrong?
But what does she have without him? Not even the promise of death, and really that’s all she wants. Him, and that gun of his that could blow her into smithereens. Better than a grenade even. She just had to bide her time, be good, bite her tongue and do all the things he and the DSO wanted her to do. Instead she disobeyed him. Got too comfortable in that house that wasn’t her home. Tried to think she’s a person and not a pet, and look what that got her. Didn’t Victor teach her what happens when she’s not good? How could she have let herself forget?
Grace feels herself slipping into a faraway place. Into the comfort of nothingness. It feels too heavy to be in the present. Too difficult to breathe without shattering herself so she lets herself slip quietly into a place beyond. She’s not here. She’s not anywhere. She’s not even alive. Not a real thing, no thoughts to be burdened with.
When Sherry comes by, the first thing she does is check on Grace. She looks at the bitten lip, the stillness of her, the stuttered movements, and the lifelessness. The marks he left on her wrists have faded already. Nothing to see here. Sherry frowns anyway, maybe says something to Grace but Grace can only blink back slowly. Sherry looks up at Leon, lips pressed. She hisses something at him, voice so faraway it makes Grace feel like she’s underwater.
“—what did you do?” Sherry’s lovely voice has acid Grace didn’t expect.
Leon turns away from Agent Hunnigan slowly, blinks at her like he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
“Did what I had to.” There’s something dull about him too. Like burning her might have singed him too. If Grace wasn’t elsewhere, she might have laughed.
Sherry scoffs. Agent Hunnigan looks between them, then hands over a thumb drive to Leon. “Wheels up in fifteen,” she says before leaving.
Leon’s hand tightens on Grace’s as Sherry starts raising her voice.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” she snarls. Grace watches the lines on her face with fascinated detachment, files away the timbre of her voice to analyze later.
“I–” Leon starts, pauses, looks away, down at the hand, her hand he’s holding. Grace notes the dullness of her fingernails. Fraying nail beds, chipped edges from her earlier struggle. His finger twitches. The one with the ring on it. “You know what happens otherwise.” A flex of his jaw. Unhappy gruff to his voice. Is that remorse? Does it matter? “I didn’t have a choice.” Leon hisses back.
Even underwater, even six feet under soil and buried emotions, when Sherry touches her elbow, Grace flinches.
“Sorry, sorry,” Sherry says immediately.
Leon’s hand tightens around hers, but Grace is too numb to squeeze back. The world is a swirl of water and light. Little pinpricks of shapes that sway in the wind. When Leon lets go, she doesn’t hold on. She’s not solid enough to be able to anyway. He walks away with Sherry, not too far, but Grace feels untethered. Left in the water and she was stupid enough to never learn how to swim. Her mother never taught her, and they moved around too much when she was young to have been sent out for any lessons. And then Grace liked drowning herself in work so much that swimming was never under consideration. Why bother?
Under the water it is peaceful. There are no doors here to walk out of, no sharp things, no real memories. Maybe she should have let Leon peel her like an orange. Just slipped into this feeling of nothingness while he took that knife and hacked her sanity away. Then, when she’s healed, she could have already forgiven him like the fool she is.
“—Miss Ashcroft?”
A voice in the water, somewhere in the darkness to the left. A wave crashes into Grace, and she’s pulled under. The voice fades in and out, like a blinking light, like fishes laughing, like—
“Are you okay? Do you—do you need anything?” It’s not someone she recognises. It’s a man. Young. Pleasant. No hard edges, no gravel, no venom that can burn her inside out.
Grace shakes her head. She can’t speak because if she opens her mouth she’ll burn her lungs with saltwater.
“Uh, oh. Okay.” The shuffling of feet. “I, uh, have this for you. Smallest size I could find in the armoury, but I think it should fit.”
Grace blinks back in the general direction of him in detached incomprehension.
“Oh, sorry. It’s—this is a vest. I was asked to find one for you.” A rustle, like he’s trying to hold something out to her. “Do you know how to put one on? Or, um, I can help you?”
He must be a new recruit. Sounds too green, too alive to have worked for the DSO that long. Too new to have his kindness pulled out and teeth grafted in the holes left behind.
Her mind sways along the current. She floats along like a leaf.
“Miss Ashcroft?”
Something touches her wrist. The same one Leon held between his fingers to drag her out into the open where there are no walls, no cover, no bed to hide under. Grace knows she bruises easy. Must have left a mark there like a bracelet. But it's healed now. She's healed now, right? The collar around her neck itches, tingles, burns.
The hand that is not Leon’s reaches for her elbow. Leather straps. Claws and knives digging in. There will be teeth next. The sharks have found her. There’s blood in the water—
She screams, tries to swim, tries to get away from the tangle of seaweed that wraps around her arm, pulling her under, into a vast blackness that you don’t come back from.
“L-Leon?” Her voice comes out strangled. He’s not her friend, he’d said, but it’s a knee-jerk reaction to call out to him.
Footsteps, splashing, the glint of a gun, and suddenly she can see. Her eyes yank the young recruit by the collar and shove him against a wall.
“Hands off,” Leon growls at the poor boy who looks like he’s about to piss his pants.
He has short, red hair. Freckles like a sprinkle of paint against his face. He looks even younger than Grace, early twenties maybe. The fear in his round, brown eyes makes a strange sort of pleasure creep up on Grace. Something that’s half Leon, and half hers. Something she would never have felt before Rhodes Hill and Victor Gideon.
“I-I’m sorry. I was just trying to help her!” A pause, a gulp. “Sir.”
A hand tightens. The boy chokes for air.
Sherry steps in. “That’s enough, Leon.”
The waves lead her this way and that. Her eyes blink and let go of the rookie. She feels a squeeze in her chest, an ache that’s not hers, some rotten acidic feeling that she tries to move away from. But the water holds her, and she holds on to those eyes above ground.
Leon none too gently takes the bulletproof vest from the rookie and comes to her. He looks angry from Sherry’s eyes. Clenched jaw, ice-cold blue in his eyes. She wants to back up, wants to get away. Fear finds her under the water, and she doesn’t understand why. Leon won’t hurt her, even if he already did.
The ring, the knife, the hand that pulled her outside.
“Hey,” he says, making his voice all soft and low. None of the sharpness of his expression make it to her. “It’s okay.”
She wants to tell him no. She wants to tell him she hates him. She wants to scream. She wants to run.
But she has no mouth to open, no legs to run with. And even if she could, where would she go?
So she just nods.
*
It must be such a joke to have the blind girl become his eyes.
“Four to your left,” she says from her seat in the makeshift base. The chair is uncomfortable, if you can even call it a chair. It’s cold inside the tent, colder outside still. Leon was cruel enough to leave his jacket with her before heading off inside the facility. An abandoned Umbrella lab that was until recently being used by the same organisation that Leon tells her Victor's affiliated with.
The place looks hastily cleared out. As if they were warned at the last moment, and had only enough time to evacuate all personnel and let out a few infected specimens to act as a distraction for the DSO.
Leon has taken point, with a small squad with him, and left most of the soldiers with Grace. She doesn’t understand why. She won’t run. She has nowhere to run to. And underwater it doesn’t hurt as much.
She had momentarily forgotten what she is. What she’s supposed to be. For one laughable moment, she had thought she’s a person, but she hasn’t been one for over a year. Grace knows that now. Knows what happens when you let your guard down. Not your friend. She's never had one. Not even before. Why would she deserve one now?
The scrape of a knife, steel against her throat, and his hand that held it steady to her.
She’s a hundred different eyes, and each one she nudges towards the bright spot prowling the hallways. Every time he shoots one in the head, Grace imagines it’s her. Brains blown straight into the wall where the numbness is permanent and her pieces are scattered too far to be mended.
She’s lived a dozen small deaths by now. None of them hers, but oh they feel so good. The burn, the bloom, and then the explosion. Tissue that tears itself out from the force of his bullet. He is the last thing she sees every time, and it’s such a sweet death to have. Hurts her in a delicious way she can’t explain. Feelings that find her in her despite everything.
There are eighty three infected units in the facility left. She’s certain he won’t miss the twenty that she grabs hold of and redirects in a different direction, away from him, and towards a blind girl surrounded by unsuspecting soldiers.
“Three in the room ahead. And there are...different ones in the east lab.” A small part of her rises up from the water, skimming the surface to add, “B-Be careful. I can’t reach their minds. They’re c-closed off.”
Blind, crawling things. Long, sharp tongues, and such madness. There are some infections, some mutations she can’t fully reach. Ones that don’t answer her call because they speak a different language.
“Thanks,” Leon says. She holds the word in the palm of her hand and dives back beneath the surface where it’s cold and quiet.
He shoots out the infected that was her eyes in that moment and she sighs, out loud, in content. Grace jumps into a different infection, half her mind near Leon, and the other half to check up on the little group that’s coming her way. Will they tear her to pieces if she asks them? She'll have to find out before he does.
“Hey, um, hi.” The same cheery voice from before. The rookie. “I’m sorry about this morning.”
Grace doesn’t turn towards him. Her eyes are far away.
“I got you this,” he continues, and slides a paper cup of something towards her. “Careful, it’s hot.”
Grace takes a sip. It’s sweet, and for a moment she’s brought back up to the surface. It’s not hot. It’s warm. Makes her palms tingle with something pleasant.
“T-Thank you,” she mumbles down to her hands. Doesn’t see that it makes the boy smile all wide at her.
“I’m Tom, by the way. Morris.”
“G-Grace. Um, Ashcroft.”
The scrape of a chair. He takes a seat next to her. “Is this your first field mission?”
She hesitates for a second, then nods.
“Mine too.”
Grace feels a familiar gutteral, acidic feeling again. Blooming from Leon’s chest and seeping into hers. Even from far away, separated by walls and zombies, she knows it's him. She blinks into the room he’s in, into the body of a sole once-upon-a-woman in a tattered lab coat.
The boy next to her says something. It doesn’t matter.
Leon is on his hands and knees, above a long dead zombie. He lifts his hatchet and hacks at it. Again, again, again. He looks like he’s getting his upset out on the long dead flesh. Leon surges into the corpse, separates the spine from the body and slams all of it down again. He gets up, dipped in blood, angry, upset, hot all over like the world is ending.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. From her mouth, through the comms, as the dead woman she’s looking at him through steps closer. He turns but makes no move to hurt the body she’s in, knowing it’s her.
But he looks more pissed than he did when she disobeyed him, more than he did talking to Agent Hunnigan. He looks as mad as he was when he found her on the floor when the med staff went rogue.
Ugly, black fear finds her. She must have made a mistake. He must have found out. She drags herself up to the surface, trembling, aching. “S-S-Sorry,” she mumbles. Tries to say it louder for him but there’s water in her lungs. She scrambles to find the twenty infected she had set aside on her whims, sends them back into the facility, scattering, erasing her fingerprints. Another time, next time, she thinks. She needs to make it right for now. She needs to be good. She needs—
“Hey,” a gloved hand on the cheek that isn’t hers. He’s looking right at her. Speaking to her but it’s not her body, only a decayed imitation she’s pretending to be. A husk of someone else. But he’s looking at it and he’s seeing her. Grace Ashcroft, formerly FBI, pet to Victor Gideon. Who knows what she’s now. “Grace.”
There’s softness in the way he says her name. The way the syllable tumbles out of him. That maddening anger, that rotten burn is leaving him, melting down into the floor, tucked away to the side. Just feather-like things between them, and a T-virus infection that sustains it.
“Breathe, Grace,” he says. “You’re good. It’s all good. I’m not mad.”
She breathes, shakily, unsteadily. Swallows all the water down, coughs. “You w-were, though. F-Felt it.”
He curses. The hand against her cheek holds steady. He swipes a thumb close to the lips that are not hers. “Forgot about that,” he says. “I’m not mad at you.”
Then why? Who else is there? What else is he bothered with?
Maybe he’s wondering about his wife. Upset he’s here, stuck babysitting some lovesick girl, while the love of his life is tucked away in his real house, probably somewhere in DC.
She feels the tang of bile at the thought. Don’t think, don’t think. She dives into the water. She has to be good, so she nods—makes the body that isn’t hers nod. “O-Okay.”
*
She walks with him, in the decayed husk of another woman. The other-other woman. She would laugh if she could.
Leon doesn’t say anything about the zombie trailing after him like a lost puppy. Too professional to comment maybe, or perhaps flattered by her twisted attraction to him.
The cup of coffee Tom got for her has gone cold in her hands. Grace is too busy walking the overrun hallways of the lab with Leon like they’re out for an evening stroll. She imagines that she’s back in her FBI days. They’ve sent her on fieldwork with the handsome DSO agent because she survived Wrenwood, or maybe Rhodes Hill and now she’s a counter-bioterrorism agent. In the big leagues with Leon Kennedy.
In this dream of a dream, he’s her mentor. She’s a shy rookie agent he saved from an outbreak at Rhodes Hill where she was sent to investigate. He’s cold and quiet but oh so kind. She has a crush on him, but he’s married. She’ll think of him while she writes the after-action report, his arms that cut through sinew and flesh like nothing, his fingers that pull the trigger of his hand-canon without breaking his bones in the recoil, his sweet mouth that smiles at her when she packs up for the night and offers her a ride home.
She’ll decline, and think of him all the way in the bus, and then while she’s eating dinner, and then later, in the comforting space between almost sleep and memory when she will put a hand between her legs and imagine it’s him and his fingers.
The ache in this dream is the bittersweet hurt of an unrequited crush. Simple, bearable. Survivable. She’ll cry over him for maybe a year, and then she’ll move on. Not the haunting of a knife, or the cold press of metal against her cunt. Not the promise of a bullet that he has still yet to keep. Not a ring and no wife in an empty house. Just the two of them and all her trauma spilled out on the floor.
“What’s it like?” he asks her, breaking the dream of a dream of a dream. “Being in two places at once.”
She doesn’t tell him she’s in three places right now. “It was…s-strange at first,” she says. “D-Dizzying.”
He grunts as he pulls a cupboard aside that was blocking their way, then motions her forward.
“And now?”
“F-Feels more, um, stable, I guess.”
“Does it—hurt?”
She tilts her head, the dead woman tilts her head too. “Hurts?”
“When you…” he makes a vague gesture around her.
She shakes her head. Realises he’s elsewhere so she makes the zombie beside him shake her head. “It’s like, um, putting on glasses for the first time. I used to get h-h-headaches.”
“Not anymore?”
“No.”
She’s sure somewhere out there there’ll be an analyst making a note of all of this. Going through the transcripts of her small talk, combing it for relevant information about Elpis. Could have been her in another life. In this one she doesn’t get sent to the field. Leon still finds her, recruits her, and puts her in front of a screen to analyse terabytes of data, find all the right patterns that lead to possible bioterrorism. They stop bad things from happening. There is no ring this time. She still has a crush. He knows but he makes no moves. She asks him out first. Stammering, shy, stupid.
He says yes.
Grace lets the waves wash this dream off her skin. It’s too sweet, too unreal. It would never happen like that. She doesn’t deserve good things. Not in this life, not in others either.
“Sherry, I’m at the terminal.”
Grace watches from the sidelines, half drowning, half dreaming, as Leon follows Sherry’s instructions over comms. He spares her a glance, leans to the side without taking his eyes off the screen to grab a chair and motions for her to take a seat.
She does. Seated in two place at once, while a few other eyes run, scream, claw themselves through the facility. She considers catching them again, sending them back on her mission but shatters violently when she sees his photo on the screen. Victor.
She switches to Leon’s eyes to read the files. A sticky, cold feeling descending down her spine, making all her nerve endings tingle through the numbness of the water. He was here. He was here.
Where she sits now. Victor sat here. Same chair, same room. Breathed the same air. Coughed. Smiled, in that sticky way of his. His thin tongue tasting the air. How long ago? She reads but there’s nothing.
“Hey” Leon says. “He isn’t here.”
He looks at the body that isn’t hers and she realises that it’s shaking. In her real one, in the makeshift seat far away she’s still as stone. Unmoving. Stuck. Her feet nailed to the ground, her hands bound, her mouth gagged. In a gurney, strapped upside down to let the blood flow down from her veins into a gleaming bottle for collection.
She can’t see the sun, can’t see the sky. Hasn’t felt the rain in two years. Victor’s hand wraps around her throat. Cold, leathery. Devoid of life because he’s more virus than man. The way he pumped himself full of the T-virus, and something more, something beyond Grace’s reach. It didn’t listen to her. He didn’t listen to her.
He’ll break Leon, she knows. Make her watch. He always made her watch.
“And even if he was,” Leon murmurs. Voice quiet and lethal. The slow simmer of anger that was always at a steady boil, “you don’t have to worry about that fuck while I’m around.”
She’s afraid of Leon too though. Of what he can do to her, of everything she’ll let him do. And of all the things Victor could do to him, just to break Grace. Or even just for amusement.
She tries to open her mouth, sound out the words, say she’s fine but her tongue is glued to the roof of her mouth, and her lips are stitched together so when she tries to pry them apart only a pathetic sound leaves her throat.
“Grace, he’s not here.” Leon is firm. He believes it. “I made sure. Wouldn’t have brought you along if he was.”
There are so many things she wants to say to this. She wants to laugh at his face just to make him mad at her. Spit at him, push him, tell him she hates him. But she doesn’t. It’s sad, it’s stupid, it’s fucking pathetic—but she believes him.
She lets the water drag her further under. Where there are no lights, and she can’t see the rippling sunlight above. The cold is a blanket around her—her eyes, her ears, her fractured mind.
“S-Six incoming,” she says. “East corridor.”
*
She makes them stand in line, and all Leon has to do is shoot them, one after the other. They wait for Sherry to extract all they need from the terminal before they move on. Now it’s just cleanup. And then home, Leon says.
What's actually be home for him, though? A townhouse in DC probably. She knows that's where DSO's main branch is. He probably stays close. His wife's waiting for him there probably, or maybe she’s also a DSO operative, away on her own mission. That would explain why he has all this time to spend with Grace. Fool around, her treacherous mind supplies.
There’s no shame so deep underwater so she only needs a flick of her wrist to send the thought scattering.
She gets up from the chair. Here, and far away too. “We have more coming our way. Bloated ones.”
“Blisterheads,” Leon looks down at himself—his gloved hand and the gun in holds. Silver, and a black grip. Wings. He grips it tighter for a second, makes a decision, and then flips it around—holding it out to her, barrel pointed at himself.
“You got any shooting experience?"
She looks at him mutely. Not comprehending what he’s trying to say.
“I was—” she gulps. Water in her lungs. She can see a pinprick of shimmery light that leads up to the surface. She pries her tongue down. “B-Basic training at the Academy. And then I was—um, practising on my own. My aim isn’t—wasn’t—the best.”
He nods like he understands. But instead of taking the gun back he brings up her hands and wraps them around the grip. “Feet apart. Use both hands. This one recoils like a bitch.”
“I don’t understand.”
Leon grins. All wide and wild teeth. Lopsided, hair in his eyes, lips that she has kissed. “You catch even a shadow of Gideon’s ugly ass here, you take the shot. Promise you there won’t be enough pieces left to salvage.”
There’s a glint in his eyes that makes her ache. It hurts to hate him, and hurts not to. Hurts to see the ring on his finger and know that she can’t kiss him again.
The gun is so much heavier in her hands than she thought it would be. She had held it before but he’d carried most of the weight. She imagines the recoil of such a beast of a weapon might blow her own brains out.
Delicious.
“Come on,” Leon gestures for her to follow him. “Let’s get out of here. I’m tired of this place.”
She is too. She follows after him, a few paces behind, half a mind all over the place, warning him of incoming enemies before they catch up. He makes swift work of them. Switched off to a handgun with lesser firepower, but that doesn’t slow him down one bit. Whatever he doesn’t shoot dead, he finishes off with his hatchet. Glints of silver and black. His hair, his axe, his ring, his eyes.
If he swings that hatchet hard enough to separate her head from her shoulders, will she be able to feel it? Will she be able to stitch herself back?
When the last of the infected come shambling in, Leon shakes the hatchet to wipe out the blood and motions with his head towards them.
“You wanna have a go?”
The gun is steady between the fingers of the other, but the paper cup in her hands shakes. She feels herself rising up to the surface as she aims—feet apart, both hands, shoulders locked to brace for impact, and boom!
The ricochet hits all the way to the bones of her real body. A warm, tingling sensation that pulls her up even further.
The three infected bodies that were making their way to her are crumpled on the floor. Shattered. One clean line, and their heads are pasted over the walls, little bloody pieces. An explosion of delightful gore. Hot against her cheeks. The splatter found her too, under the water, against all odds. Grace feels a tear against her cheek—her real cheek.
The recoil sent the body she was highjacking tumbling backwards until Leon catches her. He’s careful with her, even when it’s not really her.
There’s something boyish in his smile. Some trace of youth in the crinkles under his eyes. Some of the splatter got on him too but he’s unbothered. He looks at her with pride. Little bits of happy things pulling at his lips.
She wants to kiss him. Shove this dead tongue down his throat, hold him down and make him retch. Then bite down so hard she tears something. Instead she smiles back at him, and watches the spark in his eyes and the crinkle of his mouth turn to horror as she places the gun in her mouth and pulls the trigger before he can stop her.
It’s beautiful. The tearing of flesh, the burn, the pain. Sweet, sticky. Hot against her face. To be undone. She hears Leon curse. Not next to her because she blew out those ears, those eyes, that whole face—but through the comms and she gasps, half pleasure, half pain, quiet enough for just the two of them.
She ducks back underwater because she knows what's coming. Anger. He's bound to be mad at her. She doesn’t know why. That body wasn't hers but with the way he’s swearing to high heaven, she knows she did something wrong.
“Leon?” It’s Sherry on comms, alarmed. “What’s wrong.”
He swallows the last dredges of a soulfelt fuck, breathes through his nose, loudly. The pacing of feet, shuffles. “Nothing,” he says, eventually.
“Leon.”
“It’s nothing,” he insists. “Stubbed my toe.”
It’s Sherry’s turn to sigh.
“Lab's all clear,” Leon says. “Heading back now. We got all we wanted?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” Leon says. “Alpha team—burn the place down.”
*
He’s quiet in the car ride back. Not in an angry way, Grace notes with confused fascination. Quiet in a contemplative way.
There’s blood on his face, while she’s pristine. She’s still half living in that moment where the bullet shattered the face that wasn’t hers. If she licks the evidence of her almost death from his face, will it taste just as good?
Back at home that’s not really her home, she crawls back into bed. He doesn’t try to coax her out like he’d been doing for the past few days. Leaves her be to her moment of peace. When the dreams find her, it’s not as bad because Victor isn’t there.
It’s just Grace and Leon. A hospital bed, straps, glass walls, a jacket. He sits next to her, holding her hand, telling her she’ll be fine. It’ll be over soon.
A shadow steps up from behind him. A blur of a person. A woman with a silver ring like Leon’s. She hands him a scalpel and whispers something in his ear. He nods solemnly, and he begins to dig into Grace’s flesh.
The whole time Grace finds herself babbling apologies to the shadow of a woman. She’s sorry. She didn’t know. And by the time she did, it was too late. She's grown too attached now.
“You could have anyone,” the woman tells her while Leon slices Grace into little ribbons.
But there wasn’t—isn’t anyone else. Only the husband of a ghost who exists somewhere else. She probably doesn’t even know. Grace doesn’t think Leon calls his wife with updates on his…whatever Grace is.
She doesn’t wake up screaming but he’s there. To calm her down, to rub her back, to press her hands down against the mattress so she doesn’t scratch out her own flesh like she did last time. His touch burns her. Makes her scream, makes her want to retch with disgust at herself. Sickened by her own want. He’s gentle in his strength holding her down. Force that isn’t forceful. Not like when he tried to drag her out for the mission. Fingers that pressed into her thin wrists. She yanks a hand free, pushes him away. Screams, guttural and raw.
“Don’t touch me!”
He flinches. His grip loosens. She sobs. “D-D-Don’t…” the words trail away from her. She shuffles back, away, away from this man she wishes she hated. Her body tumbles down from the bed, trying to pull the darkness and water into her mind, but it’s too much. She’s raw from sleep, and unable to protect herself.
Large hands tug at her, the sharp presence of steel against her skin. Victor’s low voice around her neck and cold, wet skin. In the corner of the room she can’t see there’s a woman whose face she doesn’t know, saying nothing, accusing her of nothing, but it’s a heavier presence than Victor.
Leon tries to pull her up but Grace shuffles away until her back hits the wall and she curls into herself. If he touches her when she’s like this, she will break. She will break and she will forget everything that’s wrong. She will forgive him. She will let him touch her.
She can’t do that. She can’t. The woman is still in the room with them. She will always be. There and not there. Her hair is black sometimes, blonde, then red, then brown, and sprinkled with grey. Sometimes it’s silver, all of it, like Grace. But not Grace.
An ugly part of her tries to tell her that morals and anger are for the privileged. Grace can’t afford these things. Not anymore.
His hands hover around for another long moment—wanting to touch but too uncertain. She hears him swear under his breath and then eventually leave her alone. On the cold floor, by herself, in the dark.
She hears the click of the door and wants to scream for him to come back. To beg, to apologise. But she bites her lip and sobs herself to sleep instead.
In the morning, she’s back on the bed, covers on, tears wiped. She doesn’t question it. Just ducks back into the void that holds her together in one piece.
*
He takes her on two more missions. A few days of break in between.
She’s good. She behaves. Does as she’s told, even if both Sherry and Leon seem strangely bothered by her nonchalance. Sherry tries talking to her, with Leon, and away from him but Grace has nothing she can say. If she brings her head out of the darkness, she will scream until her lungs burn. She will grab the nearest gun and blow her brains out, even if she heals back in a few hours. There were many escape attempts she had tried in Rhodes Hill, before Victor crushed that out of her, so she knows better now.
She follows Leon around as if he has a tether to her. A leash to add to her collar. Even from far away, from the safety of a covered tent, barricades and soldiers around her. Even with young and foolish Tom Morris in the next seat offering her company and good humour and tea, she’s with Leon, in a corralled off street where an outbreak occurred similar to Wrenwood.
She’s in the body of a woman who was on her way to work. Other than the prick on her neck, and the blood running down her mouth, she could be alive. Her limbs move in all the right ways. Nimble, deft. This woman used to work out. Grace feels better than herself like this. Almost.
It’s a simple cleanup job. They’ve already barricaded the site, and evacuated all civilians. Only eyes running around now, to be picked off one by one by Leon and his rabid little monster. He hands her a gun almost from the start. A semi-automatic. It’s compact; not as heavy as the other one of silver and wings. This one’s got far less firepower as well.
“Go for the knees first,” Leon instructs. “Slows ‘em down. Gives you enough time to aim for the head.”
He corrects her stance, then nods with an almost smile hovering near his lips when she hits her mark in one go. His non-praise, and the tightness in his chest makes her fingertips tingle, her bones hurt. She’s not drowned herself enough to be immune to him, just at the soft brink of pain and pleasure.
He’s quick to take the gun back from her when it’s over, before she can have her suicide rehersal again. He’s been vigilant ever since the last time. He gently coaxes her back to her own body before letting the DSO cart off the dead woman to be added to their experiment stock.
“Evidence,” he tells her. But why would the DSO need evidence when there will never be a trial?
Back at home, under the safety of the blankets that smell like Leon, she overhears him on the phone with Sherry, voice low, and a sigh of frustration “— dunno what to do.” She feels him pulling at his hair, closing his eyes.
Grace doesn’t understand what he’s upset about. Couldn’t be her. She’s been on her best behaviour. Been to all the missions without a peep of complaint. She leaves the bedroom sometimes too, to sit on the couch as she lets her mind wander to his, reading through the reports he skims late at night. She lets the glass of whiskey and the black on white words on the screen lull her to sleep because he’s taken to sleeping on the sofa and she doesn’t know how to fall asleep on her own, without being pumped full of drugs.
She takes these moments to find out about Victor's whereabouts. He seems to be one step ahead of the DSO, running from state to state, one lab to another facility. She learns that they almost caught him, just a few days ago. Just one of those days where Leon had been gone from home for a good long time, leaving Grace sightless and alone, left to do whatever she wanted (and what she wanted was more sleep). He’d come back home angry and smelling like smoke. She’d felt the urge to flinch but also hold him. He'd looked like he was one strong breeze away from falling down. Instead she’d watched with his eyes as he gulped drink after drink and typed out a messy after-action report with blood still under his fingernails.
*
It all comes crumbling down on Thursday.
It’s an ugly, humid, wet morning. Rained till late last night. Grace had fallen asleep to the sound of it, and the calm of reading through another one of Leon’s reports. This one was from a raid at a Tricell facility not too far away. No trace of Victor there, but someone was cooking a nasty gourmet virus, and the DSO got tipped off just in time.
Some of these reports read like science-fiction almost. If you hand Grace a cup of tea, and unrestricted access, she could read them all in a day. Maybe even solve a case or two. Stories that can’t possibly be real, except for the parts that happened to her.
Everything is fine, until it isn’t. Grace and Leon have a better understanding now—a tentative rhythm almost. She’ll scope out the place, let Leon know enough information to plan out an entry and exit route based on the agenda—cleanup, or retrieval. Sherry’s usually on comms offering outside support—floor plans, and coordinating backup.
Grace’s carefully crafted action plan, her dispassionate, lovely detachment, the water that holds her close and cold all comes crashing down on her. The air leaves her as the car comes to a halt outside a dusty white mansion with a stone fountain right outside. Grace knows that this is not Rhodes Hill. They're nowhere near. She kept Leon's eyes on the road the whole way. And yet, it looks so much like it. Tall, grooved pillars welcoming them. A long set of stairs she had once fallen down from while making one of her escapes. Boxwood hedges like a necklace near the entrance.
Grace knows she can’t make can’t make a fuss. Can’t say no. Can’t stay in the car and refuse to leave and cry and scream and beg, but her body doesn’t want to move. She’s grown roots, dug herself into the seat and her jaw has found itself locked.
Leon turns to her, in confusion at first, but he must have noticed the similarities of the building to her old prison because he curses under his breath. A hand reaches for her, hesitates, and he drops it by his side. He’s been doing this a lot. Almost touching, then backing away as if she broke something when she rejected his touch that one time. As if he’s ashamed of what he did. The mockery of her torment. As if.
He backs the car out, throwing her a concerned look she can’t see. Breathing feels impossible until the trees around the estate cover up the view of the fountain and those white, white walls and their ornate ivory pillars.
Grace’s fingers find her elbows, crosses her arms around herself to hold the shaking back. She can hear Leon’s muted voice on comms and next to her, saying something furiously to Sherry probably. Asking the ground team to shift base elsewhere. Too close to the site. Something compromised something.
His hands are on the wheel, clenched tight, veins running up the length of his arms like rivers. That arm around her throat could snap her in two. She wants it there and she doesn’t.
She settles on the shape of them, the taut skin, the ridges, the scars. The pull of his gloves around the wheel. There’s a tightness in his jaw too. She feels it, settles herself there, follows the map of his skin. She breathes in. Out. Then in, over and over until she’s with Leon, in his car, on the nice heated seat, in her own clothes, her own body in the present and not strapped to a gurney in a room of thick white walls that absorb screams and prayers equally.
It’s okay, she tells herself. You’re okay. You’re okay. Just breathe.
“Grace,” he says, right there, next to her. With her, keeping her safe, in one piece, out of the building that he set on fire. “You with me?”
She nods.
“Okay,” he says. Nothing more. They sit there for a little longer, a silence, a stillness between them, thick with tension and comfort in equal, confusing parts. When her hands stop shaking, he starts the car.
*
It takes forty minutes to set up the base again, in a location close enough but with the direct view of the mansion obstructed. Not the most efficient, Grace knows. She notices agents throwing ugly looks towards them, safely ensconced inside the car while teams of men haul equipment, weapons, and a full ass tent through the wet, muddy ground.
Leon, inexplicably, puts on music while they wait. His fingers drum on the wheel off-key, until she mentally nudges them into following the beat without him noticing.
She was never a Metallica person but she prefers it over the silence. Could be that Leon thought heavy metal would hype her up for the fight ahead, but it really isn’t her thing even if it seems like his. He’s mouthing the words of Enter Sandman quietly. Something light in the way he nods his head in little jerky movements. She watches him through the reflection in the side mirror. His floppy hair bouncing—greys and all. His eyes are unfocused and something silly stirs in Grace.
Remember the knife.
But at this moment there is no ugly glint of steel. Only music, the heat inside the car, the steady drizzle of rain. The slow ticking of time and the fact that he delayed the entire operation just to shift the temporary base for her.
The music stops, and he tilts his head towards her.
“What’s your poison, Grace?”
She blinks at him as if she’s slow in the head.
“You don’t seem like a heavy metal girl,” he explains.
She doesn’t know how to tell him she can’t think of anything. Music has been so far from her mind for so long. It feels unreal to her now. Victor had cut her ears off once. Gutted her ear canal and watched with pleasure as they grew back but the tinnitus and ache did not leave Grace for weeks. Sounds were too much for a while. Everything was too loud, too grating, too painful.
He waits for her patiently, and Grace tries to think about that life before. That girl with her headphones and music, singing alone in her room in nothing but her underwear and tank top while she worked herself to the bone on reports for her ungrateful boss; that girl has been dead for a while, but what would she like to listen to if she were here now?
Probably something light to go with the shitty weather. A mopey song. Maybe a love song. Give her angst, give her—
“This fucking guy,” Leon curses under his breath and Grace is yanked out of her thoughts to see Tom Morris, rookie agent coming towards them. He looks like a wet puppy in the rain as he knocks on Leon’s window. He waves too, then remembers that she can’t see when Grace doesn’t bother turning her head towards him and drops his hand with a flop.
“H-Hey,” he says when Leon rolls down the window. She hears him audibly swallow with the look Leon gives him. “I, uh, sir, Agent Kennedy, sir.”
“Yes?” Leon hisses.
“We’re almost set up. I was asked to let you know the team’s about to get started.”
Leon grunts in acknowledgement. Maybe the poor boy thought they’d follow him back to camp but Leon keeps his ass firmly on the seat.
“Um,” Agent Morris moves from one foot to another. “Miss Ashcro—”
Leon rolls up the window. “Grace?”
She tilts her head up towards him.
“You—” he looks away, hands clenching. “You can stay back for today. I’ll speak with Hunnigan. The Wolves and I can take care of this.”
“Why?” she asks. It doesn’t make sense. He brought her here at knifepoint.
“Allewood House is a nursing home,” he explains. “I—I didn’t think it would be like Rhodes Hill, but of fucking course it would be triggering for you. It’s one of Umberall’s old—”
“No. Why are you doing this?” she asks, softly. Her heart is thrumming in his chest, half-exposed, bleeding. A bruised apple.
His brows pull together. “What—”
“You’re not my f-f-friend,” she bites. Right into the skin of her heart. Something bitter spilling out from the flesh. “So, w-why?”
His mouth opens. Closes.
He looks away. She feels that uncomfortable churn in his heart, tugs herself towards it, trying to make sense of the lines and undulations.
“Can’t have you going into the field in this state,” he says, but there’s something stony about the words. Like he’s reading off a script. “Could compromise the mission, endanger my men.”
“Okay,” she accepts his lies. Feels the water lapping at her neck, telling her to submerge. “Could—c-c-could you ask Tom to sit here with me?”
“Who?” he asks, incredulously. The churning in him turns into a storm, little flecks of ugly dark roots forming.
“Agent Morris,” she says. She takes hold of those roots and twists them, making the darkness inside him grow. “He’s—he’s n-nice to me.”
There’s a slight redness to Leon’s vision. A black bubbling ache in his chest that Grace pinches and prods, makes it swell like a fractured limb. A hand reaches for her, but just like every other time stops just short of touching her skin. He drops it and gets out of the car.
Grace watches him go as she closes her eyes and dips under the water. Almost, she thinks. Almost had him.