Chapter Text
They say you never know someone until you fight beside him. Or maybe they say you never know someone until you fight him. In the span of what would be the worst day of his life, Leon knew Luis. He tracked Luis' trail, read Luis' clandestine notes, and envied Luis' graceful exits. Leon and Luis fought back-to-back, as Luis quipped and Leon tossed sweat-clumped hair out of his eyes and let his body do nothing more than reloading and shooting, shooting and reloading, keeping his eyes and his gun on the villagers and keeping his mind on Luis. There was no way he couldn't, and even when he couldn't see Luis he knew what spare, savage beauty the man in battle was.
They say that relationships formed in stressful situations never work out, and Leon was pretty sure they said it in Speed but that doesn't make it any less true. It's not true because the people fall apart, though; it's true because any love that perfect is fated to end in death. Leon knew he loved Luis from the moment he felt the pressure of the man's shoulderblades against him and heard the smile in his voice. Leon knew that Luis loved him because nobody fights so hard for a stranger he isn't a little in love with, assuming money's not involved, and because Luis said so.
There was also the kiss. it happened in the house, the one Leon thinks of as The House, where they had stood shoulder-to-shoulder and fought, not for freedom or life or the girl upstairs, but for each other, out of love. Leon knew this was true because it was how he felt, and when he followed Luis to make a goodbye Leon found himself caught around the waist, and pressed to the wall, and kissed. It was too short, could never have been anything but too short an amount of time before Leon found himself cold and alone, his heart pounding and his hands shaking where they clutched at the air. Initially, he'd thought he couldn't feel anything more painful than that separation, but when he saw the tip of that monster's limb break through Luis' sternum, Leon knew what it felt like to die.
Leon won, of course, if you could call it winning. Someone other than Leon might have called it a Pyrrhic victory. He felt nothing when the President hung the medal of honor around his neck at a sparsely-attended ceremony. He felt nothing when Ashley's arms followed, and he could hear her heartbeat, and knew she was safe at long last. He felt nothing when he finally, finally arrived at the sparse apartment he called 'home', in the interstitial place between cities, in the middle of nowhere. Leon felt nothing until he remembered, with a jolt, and threw the narrow room out of order in searching. When he found it, he threw his clothes off his bed and lay the attaché case carefully down on the bedspread, popping the latch and removing the guns one by one, reverently, with gestures strikingly different from the one he'd used to tug off the medal and toss it on his kitchen counter. When all the guns and the plants and the spray were gone, he carefully ran a hand under the black foam, lifting a corner, and pulled it out.
Leon laid it gently on the worn quilt, in front of the beaten black case and surrounded by myriad well-used and hastily-upgraded weapons. With the reverence due a saint's reliquary, Leon raised a shaking hand and stroked it, very gently. At the rough, truncated end, he continued the gesture, smoothing his palm up over an invisible form until he paused, hand hovering above the pillow. The spell was broken. Until that moment Leon had not fully understood why it was that he had, after he'd felt the last of the breath escape Luis' lips, half-listening to the sharp static that was Ashley's cries, pulled out his knife with surprisingly steady hands and sawed off Luis' ring finger. Leon hadn't given it enough thought to put a rationale to it before he had hidden the finger, still sticky with that precious blood, under the foam of his weapons case. He might have considered it a token, a memory, but there were easier tokens to retrieve, less bloody ones, and Leon knew even then he'd never be able or want to erase the burn of Luis' living hands on his body. It might have been a promise for revenge, but Leon wouldn't have kept it after, if that were true, and it wasn't as though he hadn't been planning on killing Saddler regardless. Until that moment, kneeling on his threadbare carpet in front of his threadbare quilt, even a gaze filmed over by the tears he could finally allow to flow not failing to notice that the hand that should have covered Luis' cheek lay on empty space, Leon had not known why he had taken Luis' finger. It was only in this place, where he'd locked away the horror of his only day as a police officer in Raccoon City, that he knew what to do.
The number Thompson had given him didn't have a name attached to it. When the ringing on the line finally stopped, Leon felt the bottom drop out of this world. The idea that maybe success in his previous quest, now barely a distant memory, had caused failure in this one, was as consuming as his previous apathy had been. Then Leon heard breathing, soft but tainted by a faint rattle, on the other end of the line, and for the first time in a month he almost felt like smiling.
"My name is Leon Kennedy," he said, steadily, into the receiver. "I think you know who I am." The man on the other end gave him a wet chuckle.
"Yes. I know who you are." Leon waited as the man cleared his throat, apparently painfully. "You've caused a lot of trouble for us, Mr. Kennedy. The kind of trouble that inspires people to run from those for whom they've caused it, not call them up in the middle of the night." Here the man paused to cough, and Leon didn't feel at all sorry for him.
"I must be a serious pest for you, then. One you'd like to see no longer a problem?" Leon's heart pounded, his blood rushed in his ears, his mouth was dry. The man chuckled.
"An accurate assessment, Mr. Kennedy, although one wonders if you are really so lacking in friends that you really need to call up your enemies at three in the morning to have your ego stroked?" Kneeling in his apartment, looking down at the recovered finger of the only man he will ever love, Leon grinned. It was not a pleasant expression, even on him; it was one that pulled the lips back from the teeth in order to get a clearer bite.
"I'm going to ask you a question, and then depending on the answer I'm either going to make you an offer or hang up. Either way, I won't be a problem for you anymore." Leon swallowed, thickly. The knowledge that he would not be apart from Luis for long, one way or another, was powerful enough to make him feel faint.
"You intrigue me, Mr. Kennedy. Do go on," the voice rasped. Leon tried to breathe.
"Is it true that your company can make copies of people? Real people, with memories and personalities?" Laying beside the severed finger on the bed, Leon's hand shook as the man began to laugh, wetly and unpleasantly.
"Yes, Mr. Kennedy. Yes we can." The air, which Leon hadn't noticed draining out of the room, suddenly rushed back in, and Leon took a breath. And another. "The memories are more difficult, but we have had significant success with producing duplicates who possess complete personalities." Leon didn't ask, didn't even want to know. He was still grinning.
"How much do you need? How much of him do you need for this?"
"Anything with DNA, Mr. Kennedy. Anything with DNA. Even a few cells will do. Even a little blood. You'd be surprised what science can accomplish in this day and age." Hard enough that it would have hurt, had it been attached to anything, Leon wrapped a hand around the finger and tightened his grip. He wanted to laugh, or cry, or both. On the phone, the man's voice only strengthened.
"Now, Mr. Kennedy, this process is not cheap, but I believed you mentioned an offer...?" The question hung in the air like choking smoke, but Leon couldn't make himself regret. For the first time since he'd touched Luis' warm skin, Leon felt alive.
"I'll work for you. I'll do whatever you want if you can give him back to me." He shuddered, feeling as though a great burden had been lifted from him, feeling weightless. The silence on the other end was lengthy.
"Mr. Kennedy," the man said at last, barely a rasp to his voice, "you have a deal. Expect your ride in an hour, and pack light." Leon closed his eyes, smiling beatifically at the sound of the dial tone as the man on the other end of the line disconnected. In some distant corner of his mind, he was aware that he had sold his soul to something worse than the devil, but if it brought Luis back... He'd have killed Ashley to bring Luis back. This was nothing.
The finger, Luis' finger, was the first thing Leon settled into the attaché case, between the foam and the cold, battered metal. Then followed the guns, each meticulously checked and re-loaded, the ammunition, packaged in worn English and worn Spanish, and his cell phone. Leon latched the case and stood, taking nothing else with him as he shut the lights off and left his apartment to wait for his ride. He didn't look back, not at the pictures of friends and family lining his coffee table, not at the files he'd spread out on the counter, not at the mess of things in his bedroom that would lead the agents, breaking in months later to investigate his disappearance, to believe there had been a struggle. He didn't look back at the medal of honor, cold metal on the countertop. None of these things had any significance for him anymore.
Leon sat down on the bottom concrete step of the flight of stairs, and waited.