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Chapter Text

The first time Chris meets him, Leon is more of a playboy sand sculpture than a hard boiled cop.

He sits half-buried, baking underneath the sun while the rest of STARS lounge below a giant umbrella, stretched out and sighing on towels. His eyes are closed, and his pores are flushed, and if Chris wasn’t always so horrifically prosaic, he might have thought up a way to compare him to the gallery pieces littered all around the RPD.

He might have found a way to explain to himself why he was suddenly glad he’d begrudgingly agreed to come to this annual work-retreat-turned-welcome party. Or the way that Leon, so young and fresh-faced, the bags under his eyes from a lack of sleep rather than an ingrained weariness, looks to him like the inside of a full stomach. Like the creamy swirl of a plate full of noodles followed by the soft, refreshing bite of gelato.

He steps into their circle, clutching an icebox against his hip. “You don’t have to ostracize the poor guy, you know,” Chris grunts, and everybody looks up.

“Chris!” Jill cries happily, staking her paperback into the sand.

“Hey,” Barry grins in greeting. “Not my fault the kid’s unbothered by skin cancer.”

Chris’ eyes limn down over the new recruit. “Not scared of skin cancer, rookie?” he asks.

Leon stares up at him, startled at first, but then just shrugs. He shields his eyes against the sun, squinting through outgrown hair that hangs softly beside his eyes. Chris sighs, shifting until his shadow falls over Leon, his back blocking out the rays.

Speckles of seawater wet Leon’s oversized gray t-shirt, and sand clings to his sticky calves, and Chris realizes with a pang that the rookie isn’t wearing a bra.

Then there’s a second pang, following quickly on the first one’s heels: the dawning that Leon is the kind of man who would need one.

His breasts, small but round, are visible beyond the fabric, and Chris quickly blinks his eyes back onto Leon’s face. He fixes him with a harder look than before, slinging mud and shit all over his expression in hopes that it’ll conceal his surprise.

“Jesus, Chris,” Jill says exasperatedly, teasing him with a fondness behind the words, and for a second he’s electrically terrified that she’s seen him looking at Leon’s chest. “Lighten up. You can go right back to being grizzled after we throw a tennis ball around.”

“Chris takes catch very seriously,” Barry adds in a less-than discreet aside, buying Chris time to manage his own mortification spike as it trends back down to baseline. “He might not look so shiny anymore, but the guy’s a golden retriever on the inside.”

Chris blinks, unamused, and when Leon looks up at him, narrowed eyes examining as though trying to sort him into the proper category of dog, Chris makes damn sure that this time, an eyes up here t-shirt would be overkill.

Leon’s neck angles back towards Barry. “That’s not really how I’d peg him,” he says, though he doesn’t offer up his thoughts.

“You’re not welcome to peg me at all,” Chris grumbles. Then, when Leon’s mouth twists into a sympathetic smile, “Jesus,” he growls, and feels his skin heat underneath his tan. Annoyed, he drops the icebox heavily into the sand, then rummages loudly through it, tossing a Guinness to Barry.

“Yeah, so,” Jill concludes lightly. “That’s Chris.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” the rookie offers. “I’m Leon.”

He stretches out, wrist bony and hairless compared to the massive diameter that encompasses Chris’ entire being. When Chris stands up to shake it, he’s afraid of crushing too hard. Still, as soon as he takes it, Leon grips back with an intended firmness that screams of career fair counseling and professional development.

And defiance- it would be remiss to pretend not to notice it. A kind of low-key, subtle brazenness that says, in a voice as passive as it is pointed, I have tits. Look at them now and get the fuck over it.

“Kennedy,” Chris states. He narrows his eyes. What he means is, I suffocated my tits in saran wrap when I didn’t have a better option. What he means is, I see you, Leon Kennedy.

Leon’s gaze doesn’t falter. “Yup,” he says.

Chris regards his guarded, overly-casual exterior. He watches that screen of self-preservation gloss over the niceties.

“Heard you’ve never worked the field before. Where’d you pivot from?”

Leon winces, his handshake’s firmness softening like ice cream under the sun. “Er-” he answers, his confidence faltering, because he is of course too young to have pivoted from anywhere.

“Chris,” Jill groans, “Stop being an ass and sit down.”

With a little smile pulling at the corner of his face, Chris withdraws his hand. The tension breaks, and he feels Leon’s eyes on him, cautiously watchful, as he steps away to let the sand shift over his sandals and in between his toes, gently stepping out of them before pulling the t-shirt over his head.

Leon thinks he’s a dick, and it’s a fair assumption to make. Which is why he glances to find Leon’s eyes as he strips his chest bare, a quiet, meaningful look passing from his eyes to the smaller man as he reveals the white, stretched-out teeth that cut jagged beneath his nipples.

For a moment, Leon just watches. Then a small, private oh forms underneath his tongue.

I see you, Leon, Chris tells him again. And this time, when Leon looks him in the face, Leon no longer looks offended or put off. Now his expression is gentle in knowing. It’s silently saying, okay, I see you too.

Foam splashes over Chris’ hips, as soft and invigorating as a ristretto shot pulled apart by salt water and wind.

He tosses the ball into the arms of the whistling breeze, and Barry’s hand is as reliable as ever. It hits with a smack, and Barry lets out a crooning mew from twenty feet away. Chris rumbles with laughter.

A gull squawks somewhere, and as Barry shakes out his hand, he cracks open another beer. The shaken can fizzes and leaks, sending foam bubbling over the top and spilling into the sea.

“Don’t feed the fuckin’ fish,” Chris growls loudly, though he’s not even sure Barry can hear him over the wind.

This is usually all Chris needs to refocus. He’s never been the kind of professional who feels particularly refreshed after the company trip that Irons insists they take every summer- feels more like getting his toes polished while the country gets destroyed- but sporting around with Barry is more often the answer to mindfulness than he’d like to admit.

Catch, backyard barbeques, t-ball games with his kids… some days it feels like Barry’s the only thing that’s keeping him masc.

Still, there’s something wrong with his focus today. He keeps looking towards the shore, voyeuring in on Jill and the rookie where they lie, still lounging themselves underneath the sun.

Jill lifts her sunglasses up, reacting viscerally to something Leon’s just said, and something as hollow and nauseating as brine swallowed on an empty stomach fills Chris’ belly, making him roilingly hungry to know what they’re talking about.

The tennis balls flies past his head, whistling violently. Chris whips around in an instant, watching it skate once across the waves and then smack below the water.

When he turns back, Barry fixes him with a come on, jackass shrug, and then takes a shit-eating swig of his beer.

With a groan, Chris turns onto his stomach and launches off into the water, gliding towards the ball. He lifts his arm, kicking into proper swimming form, then dives underneath the water, letting the salt kiss the sore rims of his eyes and the cracks in his lips, smoothing out the jagged bangs that cling to his forehead, once spiky in his youth, now like crooked zipper-teeth too boyish for his weathered features.

His soles touch sand and starfish and rocks, and he kicks back towards the surface.

He breathes loudly as he snatches the tennis ball off the water, rivulets raining down his face, and for a moment it stings too much for him to open his eyes.

He’s grateful, though, for the droplets that cling to his eyelashes, turning the shore too blurry to see. All of sudden something old and stale is churning in his guts, seizing him with a ferocity that makes him feel as sick as he is old.

He realizes that he is disturbed by the thought that Leon might not be looking out over the ocean and watching him right now.

The hotel lobby is dim and soft. Gentle on the ears, host to a champaign-y jazz soundtrack that mixes with the quiet chatter spread throughout the room: guests holding conflabs on plush armchairs, parents nursing cocktails while their children jump up and down on the beds upstairs; staff answering phone calls from the reception desk in the entrance hall, handing out toothbrushes and fielding the occasional spring breaker who whoops obnoxiously to his friends as he checks in for the group.

Chris’ sunburn prickles invisibly on the back of his neck, stretching out his tough, tanned skin. The unfitting elegance of the room is still making him dizzy, but his fourth crystal-glass of bourbon is helping to soften out the sting. Even if it’s confusing his sixth sense to hell and back, sure that there are eyes on him every time the back of his neck prickles in discomfort.

Chris remembers a time, ages upon ages ago, when he would always feel his captain’s eyes on him. Watching not just with a professional, analytical interest, but with the curiosity of a predator. Red-hot fire pokers in his marshmallow-green eyes. How his constant surveillance of Chris finally gave meaning to his actions, if not his life.

But Wesker is long gone, and for the past twenty-three years, Chris has lived a life that no one was watching. Not as intense and probing, at least, as those green eyes that used to strip the bark off him like sandpaper.

Chris sets down his drink, and his three squares of ice clink around in liquid amber. He pinches at the cocktail straw, stabbing vacantly at the ice, when all of a sudden, it isn’t just a vague prickling at his neck anymore. There is a whole fucking person standing right beside him.

“You drink a lot,” Leon remarks.

Chris doesn’t turn. Instead, he glances at Leon out of the corner of his eyes, then flicks them back down to his drink.

“Yeah, well,” he answers in a heavy sigh, shoulders squaring as he bends over the countertop. “I weigh a lot.” He swallows, and the smoky sting of liquor clings to his cheeks. He doesn’t know why he can’t look Leon in the face. He just knows that if he tried, it would be bad.

“You watchin’ me, Kennedy?” he asks.

“No,” Leon answers, all self-aware innocence. “Just working on some forms behind ya.”

Chris picks up the glass and turns slightly in his stool, swiveling. His eyes scan over the papers spread across a glass-topped table. “Paperwork on your vacation?”

“This… isn’t really a vacation for me,” Leon answers, a friendly smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. “I haven’t technically started yet.”

He’s cute. Sweet. His knuckles are a little too rosy for Chris to imagine them hooked around the trigger of a gun, and his hair smells too much the floral hotel shampoo to picture it tangled up with blood and grit. Still, Chris imagines it for a moment: dirty uniforms and terror and gunpowder, and Chris swallows a little harder, setting a hand down on the bar to stop his thoughts from spiraling away.

“I get that,” Chris says. “Wouldn’t be watching me if it was.”

Instead of debating, Leon’s smile curves a little. “Field research,” he agrees.

A beat of silence passes between them. Chris doesn’t speak for fear of interrupting a half-formed thought. He clears his throat. Leon just looks kindly at him.

“So…” Chris fends off the straw to take down another swill, ice clinking against his front teeth. “Why’d you spend the day with STARS ‘stead of your new cop pals?”

Leon looks like he needs a seat, but instead he just leans his weight onto the bar.

“Hm,” he stalls, clearly looking not for an answer, but for a way to phrase it. Saltwater-blonde hair tufts delicately down his jawline.

He’s binding tonight. His chest is tugged tight against his body, the open button-down that he’s wearing falling flatly around his tank top. Still, a little bundle of hair is pulled into the world’s smallest loop at the base of his neck, and a candy-like femininity wraps around him- not so much that Chris could ever look at him and see him as anything other than a man, but just enough that it’s impossible for Chris to not feel like he’s watching someone teetering on the balls of their feet, masterfully tip-toeing across the world’s thinnest transition wire.

A complicated feeling churns in his gut, and Chris’ head dances with visions: drains and syringes and bad gropes and mindless lust and mewling love and crawling addictions. For a second, the barbs scattered inside of Chris start to poke at him again, and he doesn’t know if he resents the way Leon presents, or if he’s jealous of it. He coils over his drink and finishes it, tonguing at the last drops, and feels the open wound inside of him gape miserably for another.

“Well. Okay. So, I always wanted to work in justice, but I’m not…” Leon shrugs. His hands fold together, and Chris gets a good look at the bands he’s wearing, leather bracelets looping his wrists. His voice soothes the broken glass in Chris’ gut. “I don’t think I’m really the officer type. I like the specialized work you guys get to do. It’s a lot less of a power trip.” He shrugs again. “You guys are more real.”

Chris sets the empty glass on his napkin and pushes it away. Above him, the dim amber lights are starting to make him feel warm- and in its beam,na projected image plays out on the back of his eyelids: Leon, garbed in STARS and stripes of pink. Sitting on the desk that Chris spends the most hours of his life at, grinning and breathy and so close that Chris feels like their souls could merge.

“Ah,” he responds shortly. “I see.”

Leon blinks up at him, no longer distracted. “What?” he demands.

Chris leans back. He folds his arms across his chest. “You’re networking.”

“What?” Leon’s smile curls boyishly, and he shakes his head. “Nooo,” he argues.

“Yeah,” Chris clinks back unforgivingly, “You are.” He leans towards the other man, eyes narrowed accusingly. Finally looking him dead-on. Just as he thought, a rush of light opens up inside of him and the barbs get whisked away. “I knew there was something off about you. You have an agenda here, Officer Kennedy.”

Despite the gruffness of his teasing- or maybe in response to it- Leon’s smile blooms into a set of sparkling teeth. Pale rings of yellow where he’s failed to lay the whitening strips cap like crescents between his gums, and Chris feels another surge of that jealousy-turned-meanness.

This time it’s soft, though. Soft and hungry and self-hating.

Chris has been away from other trans men for so long that it’s almost like an endless void uncurling open inside of him. He thinks of the sick relief that the men he sleeps with offer, temporary and phallic, and then he thinks of the yawning loneliness that comes along with passing so goddamned well that no one ever recognizes him for what he is anymore.

Dicks are safer. He never cries for the fucking bottle when he’s nursing on an ugly dick.

He’s crying for it now, though. Wailing like an infant left alone in the fucking snow. His body is cold, and his bones are stiff, and all Chris wants to come in and feel the fire. He wants to lay his wet socks and mittens down on top of the radiator. He wants a packet of hot chocolate with the marshmallows in it. He wants to take Leon and guide the rookie down into the pit in his soul, wants to stuff him in there, metabolizing him and claiming all of what he is, so different from what Chris is, so badly that his hands quiver, reaching for the empty cup just to suckle at the sweaty condensation-water melted into the pits of the glass. He imagines himself and Leon lightening-hot together, their bodies like mirrors and soldering irons, meeting and granting him a fulfillment that he’s always been certain he’ll never, ever fucking get.

Chris waits a moment. He takes a horrible breath in.

The intensity of the feeling suddenly subsides, passing out of his heart like a boulder-sized kidney stone.

“Maybe just a little,” Leon flirts, and Chris laughs, rolling his eyes.

He shakes his head, clearing away his thoughts, then looks at Leon to try to see if he even clocked the bad place that Chris just went to in his mind. But the rookie is still just standing beside him, Leon’s face as open and soft as it was before. Sound, and teasing, and easy.

Chris lets out a shuddering breath, and just like that, he’s back. He turns towards Leon in his chair, and he can enjoy the moment for what it is again.

The long weekend progresses the same way it always does. Barry turns red. Jill body-shames him about it. Chris sleeps sunken into the hotel bed, the mattress so much softer on his aching muscles than his springy twin bed at home, the hotel tv channels seeping their dreamy blue glow into the room, filling his head with thoughts of shoot-outs and fast cars.

He changed the channel at midnight, flickering to a woman selling watches on a pedestal. Then to an easy comedy. Then, sighing, to the resort’s welcome screen, drifting off to pictures of the hotel’s elaborately shaped pool that he never uses, and the buffet that he sneaks down to early so he can pile up a plate to eat while he’s in the shower.

His mind had moved on though, the softness of the static conjuring up photorealistic recreations of Leon at the lobby bar. The moment that Leon looked down to bark out a laugh and tucked stray hair behind his ear. The sly way he moved through their conversation with humor, like a weasel always perched within eye’s reach of the den. The way Chris could feel the heat from his skin, and the softness on his lips, and how every word he spoke in that same voice were like silent ropes drawing Chris towards him.

And then he’d started to think about fate, and spiritual rewards, and the idea that all of his suffering hadn’t been for nothing- that maybe, even though it’s too early to tell, his suffering was all worth it because he finally ended up here, finally feeling this again- and then he’d shot up in bed, sweating and cold, and quickly changed the channel back to Top Gun.

Still, when he goes to meet Jill down at the beach hut, a seat saved for him on one of those creepy outdoor couches, the world feels achingly empty. In his mind, he imagines Leon working for STARS. Hair tied up, uniform on, hanging around the office. Casual trips to Chris’ desk to chat. Banter blooming over the course of dozens of intense missions. He imagines that he’s still talking to Leon. He imagines the shape of him curled up on the sectional.

He orders a whiskey and sits down next to Jill, making a comment about the surfers he can see hanging onto their boards down the dramatic slope of the shoreline.

He hears the disinterest in his own voice. Jill doesn’t ask if he’s okay, because he is, of course, always like this.

Nacreous thoughts spill from the chambers of his mind, slick and pungent, like the rainbow of an oil spill. Chris sits on the sand, beach chair pulled up so close to the dunes that seagrass sways, tickling the hair on his calves, and he knows what he’s doing.

Sunglasses on. Wesker in his head.

In his memories, his 25 year old body is still soft, not yet bulked out by all the weight training, and definitely not hardened into the fossilized archipelago that it is now. In his mind, Wesker is still making comments about his body that make his head spin. Words like cock and good boy and my pet and my best man. The feeling of Wesker’s smooth, poreless jaw nuzzled against the stubble on his cheek. The pulse of his captain’s tongue pressing into his entrance, licking the inside of his body in the ways he’d always been afraid of. His naval. His pussy. The webbing between his toes.

Chris pulls the towel around his shoulders, sheltering himself from the chilly spring breeze, and down between his legs, he feels himself stirring wetly, arousal prickling puffy and nice. Cold in the breeze. Warm from the sun.

There are not many places to go on the property of this resort. When Chris sees Leon walking along the shore, it’s not destiny, not even close. This is merely a stake out.

He watches from behind his glasses, the fluffy white towel his only fatigues, and he can’t stop his heart from somersaulting at the sight of him.

It is nothing in particular, and it is everything about him: the way that the wind tosses Leon’s hair until it surrounds his face in lion-like curls, sunlight breaking through the cloudy skies to make it glisten and dance with ribbons of strawberry blonde. His lean body, still thin with the youth of his early twenties, and the way he kicks at the sand as he walks, creamy skin buffeting by the rose-chafing wind.

Chris waits for a moment, heart beating in throat, wondering if Leon will turn and see him. Then he’s up and out of the chair, halfway across the beach, before he even realizes he’s doing it.

The wind rushes in his ears, and the cold squish of wet sand chills him, but Chris’ long strides bring him quickly to Leon’s side, approaching at enough of an angle for Leon to startle but not spook, turning sharply with his mouth opened in surprise.

It’s the way his body relaxes, though, when he realizes it’s Chris, that changes the chemical structure of Chris’ brain and dooms him suddenly in a way he realizes he hadn’t been.

“Hey,” Leon breathes out, shoulders and lips softening. His eyes flick all up and down Chris’ body. “Where’d you come from?”

Chris points towards the chair with his head, then shrugs. “Watchin’ ya,” he says lazily.

Teeth bloom, Leon’s smile spreading. He grabs it with his lips, looking down, and Chris watches his face blush as he tries to swallow the grin. Instantly, everything feels better. Leon glows over him, painting his overcast world with a light more radiant than the sun, and the warm gush of arousal between his thighs feels warmer. More alive.

He looks hungrily at Leon’s hand. His own flexes with the desire to reach out. Disgust swarms in response.

“So,” Leon says, and the bad thoughts dissolve, trickling into the grooves of his brain. “What’s this whole share-out thing? Should I be scared?”

Chris laughs roughly, and the wind steals his breath. “Nah,” he growls. “They do this every year. But Irons didn’t even show up this time, so no idea which rando has the honor of leading the trust fall.”

“Trust fall,” Leon balks.

“It’s insulting. Wish they’d just stick a loaded gun in my mouth and call it a day.”

Leon stutters. “Jesus,” he says.

“I.” Chris sighs, grabbing his face. “No,” he says, sighing harder, “I meant like. Ugh, nevermind.”

A tiny laugh skitters out with Leon’s breath. “Kay,” he says. Then, again, “Jesus, big guy.”

“That’s another thing. I always get paired up with Barry.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t trust myself to not go down with you,” Leon laughs. He shrugs, still glowing. “But I’d try.”

“Mostly it’s a lot of unnecessary bullshit,” Chris says. “This whole thing is so excessive.”

“You don’t like the beach?”

“I work for the police department,” Chris volleys back. “I’m not a fuckin’ college kid.”

Leon hooks his fingers together behind his back, swaying his hips a little so he can draw arcs in the sand with his feet as he walks. “You still come though,” he says.

“Yeah, well,” Chris grumbles.

“You love your friends,” Leon beams.

His teeth are candy corn. Chris looks again at the white-strip glow against the worn enamel, and he wants to kiss the plaque on his teeth before popping them out and crunching on them like popcorn kernels.

Leon looks at him. “Sorry,” Chris says.

Bemused, Leon’s face softens. “Huh?” he asks.

“Nothing.” Chris closes his eyes and sighs. Salty air stings his throat. “Sorry. I haven’t been myself lately.”

You destabilize me, he wants to say, but it’s inappropriate, and intensive, and it stabs every inch of him to know that there is no way now for him to prove to Leon what he’s like when he is normal.

He remembers crawling on the fucking floor tiles, drooling after Wesker. He wants to drool so bad for someone, wants to drool and beg and weep just one more time, but he’s an old fucking man now and there is nothing left for him. Love never came. He waited for it, and he hunted it down, but it’s a rabbit he never ended up catching.

Because he is the rabbit. He’s still skinned and bloody, hanging by the ears from Wesker’s fist.

“You wanna bail?”

Chris blinks. Stops. “Huh,” it’s his turn to say.

“We don’t… have to go,” Leon suggests. “We can just run away together.”

“Oh,” Chris says, frowning. He looks down. Thinks. “I don’t know. Feels... rude?”

Deadpan, playing around in a way that makes Chris’ heart squirm in his throat, Leon says, “Please, Redfield. Please don’t make me go.”

“You really should get to know your coworkers.”

“Not like this,” Leon pleads fakely.

“I brought my car,” Chris says. “I mean. I drove myself.”

Something forks in Leon’s pupils. A genuine hunger that Chris can’t make heads or tails of, but which gets his pussy throbbing again, thirsty at the possibilities. Desperate to get closer to that wry, self-aware enthusiasm, and that playful, dancing slyness.

Chris wants to pick up his hand and gnaw on the leather wristbands until they split. He wants to show Leon the spot in his hotel room where he imagines the ghost of him curled up and snoozing in the night.

“Let’s go,” Leon says, and like a rabbit leaping into its master’s hand, there is no version of this moment in which Chris could have told him no.

Chapter Text

The late spring breeze rolls debris across Chris’ windshield, sending leaves and grit tumbling across the hood. The hum of the old engine wraps Chris’ body in a rumbling warmth while the hot, cracked steering wheel leather bites playfully at his palms. Chris remembers with staggering suddenness that he always feels most at home behind the wheel of his wrangler.

“Jeeze, Redfield,” Leon winces, not unpleasantly, after he’s pulled down the windows to let the wind inside. Dust kicks up all along the quiet coastal streets. “You sure know how to make a jeep feel like a humvee.”

Chris grins. Outside, the salty air is mineral-rough but cleansing. Frantically, Leon fishes a band off his wrist and ties up his hair so he can dangle his head out of the window like a dog. Chris sneaks a glance at the puffy, blown-out tuft lassoed at the base of his skull, and smiles privately to himself. Leon glances back at him and then he smiles, too.

The unbroken highway of sand and seascape slowly starts to flatten, leveling out into a residential strip for folks daring enough to live along the waterline. Some cottages have already been elevated, perched high up on stilts and overlooking the peninsula. A bridge is coming up, and the air is getting thicker with the sulfurous scent of low tide, and Chris knows from past experience that if they don’t turn around now, they’ll end up downtown.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

An elbow hooked around the window, still splayed languidly out of the vehicle, Leon rolls his neck back into the car to look at him. His cheeks are flushed, puffed out and engorged on sea air, as though he drank every last ounce straight out of the wind. A little breathlessly, he nods. Chris turns his eyes away, fighting the grin off again.

It’s warmer downtown. Chris finds streetside parking and feeds the meter, his hands trembling a little at the thought of Leon’s mouth open, wet and mewling, nipping for a taste of his fingers.

“It’s not fair that you’re hairless,” Leon says.

Chris turns, and Leon has readjusted his hair tie, sending a hay-like splatter of a ponytail sitting high up on his scalp. He looks like a summer swordsman, but instead of telling him how much he likes it, Chris grunts at him in response. “I theme my life around my car,” he shrugs.

“Yeah, I’ve never loved anything as much as you love your jeep,” Leon says. “I can tell.”

Below him, the white-stone of the sidewalk glistens, the bricks cobbled into curving shapes. The storefronts down the road are all wood-slat and colorful, slumped and sunken like muffin tops overcooked by the salty sun.

“Wanna drive it later?” Chris asks.

“Huh?” Leon looks up at him with a childlike wonder, and Chris feels himself pulse with it. “The humvee?”

“It’s not-”

Leon breathes out through a grin, and Chris can see it in his regard: the authority Leon thinks Chris has. The gentle way that Leon tugs at it, chewing on it playfully, an effortless delight. It’s not real, but Chris is happy for him, and he’s happy to play it up for him. He misses knowing what that felt like.

Then, all at once, that same responsibility strikes him in the gut. A plea from the deepest caverns inside of him to not do to Leon what Wesker did to him.

That old surge of activation rises up in him, prickling at his gills. A buried disgust. A deep, fathomless fear that he will somehow flip the card on his youth, and end up becoming the same type of man that destroyed his own.

“Yeah, definitely,” Leon says, though his sweet voice sounds suddenly goosebumped. “You won’t kill me if I knock down a telephone pole or something?”

Chris shrugs. Hopes his words aren’t as dry as his mouth. “Like you said, she’s basically an armored vehicle. Knocking shit over’s how you keep her happy.”

Leon grins. He touches his scattered ponytail with a hand and looks away.

They eat at a diner that reeks of fried egg and bacon grease, and Chris packs black coffee down the same way he does bourbon. It’s mostly to impress Leon, though by the end of their too-casual, too-safe padded booth conversation, he feels stupid for trying to show Leon anything about him at all. All at once, he feels far too obvious. The coffee churns oily in his gut.

They slog back to the truck, Leon happily dazed by a hungry man’s feast, and Chris weighed down by all the mudwater collected in the pit of his soul. He tosses Leon the keys even though Leon’s looking sheepish and unsure behind that eager prying, because, well, he made an offer. And two, because it’s just a car. He doesn’t care what happens to the fucking thing. He doesn’t really care what happens to himself at all.

“Nice,” Leon laughs breathily as he backs up into the road and the car gives a startling jolt, revving with possibility. He’s so small as he twists his entire little body back to look at the road behind, wholly eclipsed by the driver’s seat. He doesn’t even try to adjust the mirror, and Chris doesn’t interfere.

By the time Leon starts to drive, his attention is totally absorbed in maneuvering Chris’ old, clunky deathtrap. He’s keeping his spine upright, eyes trying to staying level with the road, with no thoughts spent on adjusting the seat height. Chris continues to not interfere. Now he himself is little more than a ball of compacted scrap metal, compressed down to almost nothing.

There are so many things he wants to say. Stories he wants to tell, things he wants to show off about himself. He wants to spread himself open and put it all on the table, but he doesn’t know how, and it wouldn’t feel right. And that’s what’s even worse- being single, living alone, wasting away on his own for all these years- it hasn’t fixed a single thing that’s wrong with him. And what the hell is he meant to do if not even that could fix him?

The answer is easy: be alone. But don’t just be alone, stay alone.

But he doesn’t want to. He wants to reach out, he wants to share, but when he looks at Leon all he sees is a brick wall, and he doesn’t know how the other man would even be able to hear him.

“Hey,” Chris says.

“Wh-” Leon answers. There’s a curious smile on his lips as his eyes glance over to Chris hunched in the passenger seat. Something warmly quiet soothes the fear in Chris’ chest. Just the fact that Leon can hear him at all.

“Nothin’,” he murmurs.

There are tire marks on the street that weren’t there before, and fresh grains of sand caught in the crevices of his seat when Leon pulls over to the side of the road, parked askew with his pulse visibly racing.

“Sorry,” he says breathlessly, chewing on his own bashful laughter. A bubble of it pops out. “Sorry. Just needed to stop for a second. Phew.” He lets out a held breath and then laughs again, opening the door and tumbling out onto the grassy shoulder.

Chris follows after him, jerking the door open and stepping out. The breeze instantly grabs him, icing the beads of sweat still dampening the sides of his face from Leon’s clutch on the gas, and Leon comes rolling towards him around the back of the jeep, limbs all loose and grinning.

“It’s nice here,” he says as he adjusts his hair, blinking out at the field of sunny foliage that stretches out on this side of the road. “The coast, I mean. Grass is kind of all… dead further south.”

“There’s a reason Irons makes us drive five billion miles,” Chris shrugs.

“I wanna lie down,” Leon answers. “Do you?”

“Oh-” Chris says. “Yeah-”

“Nice!”

Chris moves to close the passenger door but finds himself cutting it short. On an impulse, he leans back into the swimming heat of the Jeep and stretches up, unhooking the latch to the glove compartment. He fishes, hand curling around the tin, then snaps it closed.

Leon watches as he eases it open with his thumbnail, revealing the three blunts inside. “Sorry,” he says in advance. “It’s all I got.” He winces. “I like the nicotine.”

“Oh,” Leon accepts, reaching for one. “Yeah, sure. That’s okay.”

“Wait,” Chris stops him, pulling it away. Leon’s hand waits in the air. His brow furrows, politely startled, and Chris wants to lick the look off his face before devouring it in too few bites. His eyes narrow, and he watches Leon delight, blushingly, at the change in demeanor. “Get good on your cop code real quick, Kennedy, you can’t bust me.”

“Weed’s legal,” Leon laughs.

“Not necessarily in this state.”

Leon squints. He looks up, thinking. “Uh…”

“Here, piggy,” Chris interrupts, nudging him, and Leon grins, plucking a blunt out of the tin. He likes being teased; Chris wants to comment on it, but he holds it in his throat like a secret unfit for speaking.

They smoke in the grass. The lighter that lives in Chris’ pocket is left around from old habits, and Leon plays with it for a while, spinning the metal box between his fingers, poking at the flame and wincing with laughter when it nips at his fingertips.

The sky seeps warmly into the grass, and Chris is so melted by the weight of it all that he doesn’t even notice Leon at first, lying on his back beside him, eyes flicking up and down the older man. “Did you ever serve?” he asks. “Sorry, it’s just- just something about you, I think.”

“Uh,” Chris says. “Yeah. The air force. It’s where Barry and I met, actually.”

Leon’s eyes flex, squinting a little. Sparkling with interest. “Tell me a story about it?”

Chris blinks. “Oh, uh.” He blows out air, turning his head back to look up at the sky. “Sure.”

“Sorry, if that’s not something you wanna revisit…” Leon quickly adds, blushing softly.

“No, it’s alright. I guess… well, when I was a kid, there was this army recruitment booth that’d set up at the state fair every summer. Kind of weird to think about now, but one year they brought this old-ass military ambulance with a blaring horn, and I climbed up there and kept scaring the shit out of everyone walking by.” He laughs a little to himself. “I was so small I had to use both arms to press it.”

Leon rolls onto his side, tucking his chin onto his arm. “You know you don’t havta join the army to get a big car,” he rumbles, voice gravelly and slow. “Plus- didn’t you say air force?”

“No, I know.” Chris rolls his eyes. “That wasn’t really a military story. Got nothing to do with shit.”

“It’s cute,” Leon says thoughtfully.

Chris’ reaction is delayed. It curls up inside of him like smoke, and before he sees the fire, he smells its presence. There’s a bad feeling in his gut. Then an erotic lightness that devours his pain. He softens, eyes gently peering out of their sockets to look towards Leon for approval.

He finds it there, gentle and receptive.

“I don’t really know anything about cars,” Leon admits. “I was a Harley Davidson kid. My dad let me do dirt bikes.” He rolls fully over onto his side, hands spreading out so that grass pokes through the space between his fingers. “I was a camp counselor for a few years, and I think I took to being a jock a little too well.” He laughs, playing with a strand of green. “I made them do the polar bear plunge and everything.”

Chris can imagine Leon with gimp and paracord bracelets decorated up and down his wrists, his hair loose, in sneakers and tall white socks, his slender body fitting perfectly into a hoodie and a pair of shorts. Chris thinks of the girl he tried to bury within himself, but when he looks at Leon, he sees a perfect fusion of birth and self-creation. Chris brutally slaughtered the body he was born into. Leon integrated it into himself.

“Nah. I’m sure the kids loved you,” he says, and it hurts like a million daggers in his heart that he can’t be with that version of Leon right now, on the edge of that sleepaway lake. It hurts that he can’t take his consciousness and put it inside of him for a moment, just long enough to know what it feels like.

He’s assuming too much, Chris realizes with a jolt of guilt. He’s making too many guesses about Leon. All of a sudden he feels awful, and he wants to ask how Leon sees himself.

But Leon is giggling too much to talk now. Curled up on his side, he chews on the soft blue wild grass like it’s a candy rope, and he seems so happy that Chris’ entire body swells with sunlight. He needs to be around it. He needs more time with it.

He is terrified to ruin it.

“Hey,” Leon giggles, flushing nervously, and Chris’ swirling uncertainty retracts its teeth back into the gums.

He clears his throat. Is careful to not even time his blinks incorrectly.

“Hi,” Chris answers uncertainly. And then they start talking again. And then it doesn’t stop. Not until the sun sinks down and the crickets come out, a restless hush settling over the field.

Chris is a boulder. A bull. And all that he wants right now is to pull Leon into him and lie there together, to never stop talking, to never break apart. All he wants is for Leon to hold him close, and for it to not be wrong to feel so goddamned much so fucking soon.

They talk, and their words seem to bind like twine and rope around them both. Vines with a couple thorns. Wires with a barb or two.

Damp from the evening chill, and clothes stained by the grass, Leon asks delicately if Chris wants to head back to the hotel.

All Chris wants is to know if Leon feels the same.

In the morning, the resort shines with color. Everything is well-saturated now, the icy undertones of the sky and the fire-flickering specks of the lobby pulled towards the surface, ballooning with enough richness to explode like lightbursts in his eyes. For the first time in a very long time, Chris feels it. That excitement. The optimism. Hunger.

Hope.

There’s meaning again. There is an end to the suffering in sight.

And just like that, all those pitiful years that he spent moping and self-hating, curled up alone and cold on his bed, refusing a blanket so that he’d have to get good with the fact that he was meant to live his life alone, is all wiped right off the slate. He has a chance again. The rest of your life always starts with a whisper, and it is so unceremonious that it makes his head spin.

The hotel pool ripples like a sacred bath house, open to the breeze but concealed by half-ceilings that create the illusion of it being indoors. Sun breaks through gaps in the overhang, slicing through the water until it turns a bubbling fruit-gusher blue, and the only person who is more surprised to see him here than Barry is Jill.

“Chris!” she exclaims, swiveling off her back on the recliner and sitting up to look at him.

“I don’t believe it,” Barry growls. He swims to the edge of the pool and lays his arms across the ledge, chlorinated water sparkling in beads along the dark hairs of his forearms. “Chris Redfield visiting the pool during the annual company retreat.” He whistles. “Times are changing.”

Chris flattens his smile with a squint, turning his eyes onto Jill, and he is struck, suddenly, by the lines on her face. The little feet of joy that pull at the corners of her eyes, and the wrinkles of weariness and experience on her face. He is so happy to see her this way. So happy to see them all still alive.

Jill is examining him- one of his closest and longest friends in all of the world. He sees the preciseness of her attention, and the absence of himself and Leon at their big retreat meeting, and though she doesn’t ask him about it, she really doesn’t have to.

Chris wants to ask if she ever thinks about Wesker. Wants to finally say it out loud, but he’s always been too much of a coward to face it head-on.

You knew, he wishes he could say to her, just to finally know for certain that it’s true. And when he packed up and left town, you know why he did.

But the shame is still too much, and he doesn’t want to ruin the moment. So instead of Wesker, or even Leon, when Chris sits down, all they talk about is swimming.

Instead of lingering at the bar, or sinking into the sand dunes with eyes watchful of the shore, Chris heads back for his hotel room, holding Leon like a secret swollen in his chest.

There are two of them- two Leons. One of them lives in his head, real, made of memories and facts. The other in his heart. Fantasies and expectations. Dreams and questions. He clings to it all, hoping desperately that they will form a whole if he pays enough attention to them both.

In his room, under the frosted glow of the television, Chris lies on his back in his underwear, a palm patting down the front of his briefs. It’s the most attention he’s given himself all week; he throbs beneath the clothing at his own touch, the soft tissue already warm and wet, kissing his fingertips through the fabric.

A heartbeat pounds in his dick as he strokes upward, teasing it gently. The engorged shape presses through his clothes, swollen with thirst, and he can’t help but spread his legs a little and moan, nails grating lightly over the thin wires of his own body hair, ghosting at his thighs as he shifts his hips to point upward at the ceiling.

Chris closes his eyes, letting the tv wash over him. He sighs, presses his palm flat over his cock, and then bucks up at it, sparks flying out at the sudden touch.

It’s slow at first, his motions self-conscious and restrained, but as he thrusts, he starts to fade. His palm presses down harder. His fingers curl towards his own entrance, pressing at it through the fabric to feel the taught strain of near-denial. He starts to huff, panting out in search of release, his cock throbbing as it ruts against the rough fabric and the hard wall of his own hand.

All at once, Chris opens his eyes, and he can see Leon perched next to him. Smaller, so much cuter than himself. Breathy with laughter, and observing with sparkling interest. Chris watches the long hair stream down behind his ears. Sees his small breasts, hanging beside masculine shoulders and a slender waist. He imagines the shape of Leon’s dick, impossibly anywhere near to the size of the one that Chris has been working on his entire life, and the way Leon might look at his body, and the encouragements he might give, and the touches he might offer. The vision of the future he might provide. The time lapse of his body, the promise of a complete and beautiful transformation.

Guilt pours sick down Chris’ veins, waterfalling hot and sticky. He imagines reaching out and grabbing Leon, pulling him against his chest, melting into one. He thinks of lying with him in the field, their words like hooks pulling them closer and closer together, and what he wants more than anything is just to have that again.

A little interest. A little attention on him.

He comes, his dick spasming against the heel of his palm, and even though there’s ice in Chris’ core, all he feels is the warmth of Leon wrapped all around him.

Chapter Text

In just twenty four hours, Chris will be home.

With the hotel comforter sticking to his skin, gone clammy and clingy from all the sweating he’s done, Chris already dreads the thought. It is a rotten plum clenched between his teeth, the wrung-out juice of his makeshift vacation ground to a putrid squelch. Sickly sweet in the way of rot, a ripeness beyond ripe. The undeniability of its truth drips gooey down his chin.

In just twenty four hours, the ever-constant tide of Chris’ boring fucking life will surge back in to wash over everything again. Shitty break room coffee because he’s too tired to get up early and make his own. Costly lunches because he’s too burnt out to press a sandwich together a few minutes before bed. Half-hour commutes and pharmacy lines, late-night talk shows and droning office banter, small town tragedy calls interspersed with nothing, nothing, more nothing.

It makes him sick. Worse than sick, it makes him desperate.

Chris clings more tightly to the phantom image of Leon in his arms than ever, wishing he could stay. If not here in this hotel with the new recruit, then with what’s left of the miasma of his projected image.

He doesn’t know why Leon seems so interested in him. He doesn’t even know if it’s real.

It doesn’t matter. It won’t be real soon enough.

There’s no room for anything in the routine that he’s built his life around. It owns him, and in exchange, the man who is owned by it is unreachable. Impossible to move. Unwantable. Unloved.

Time mothers him brutally in this way, washing over everything. Because that is exactly the arrangement that they have. She numbs his senses by paving over everything that happens in the same bricklike shade of gray. And in return, he never experiences anything deeply enough for it to hurt him.

Or deeply enough for it to make him happy.

For a long time Chris lies alone on the hotel bed, the salt of daydreaming making his belly sick. The longer Chris tries to remember Leon, the hotter the film strip burns. Dread eats through Leon’s papery likeness until all that’s left is a scalding metal reel.

He starts to forget Leon’s scent. The dotted constellation of the moles on his face. The sound of his bright, popping laughter, and that corkscrew shine of curiosity in his eyes.

All of a sudden, Chris can’t take it anymore. He peels the soggy blankets off him and rockets to his feet- aching and misaligned from too much time lying down- and in the glow of the muted tv, hurriedly changes, yanking a towel off the rack and slinging it around his shoulders.

“Fuck it,” he growls to himself. It’s the last night.

With supplies in his hand and resolve in his heart, Chris sets out in pursuit of his usual last-night ritual, clutching the secret he gleaned on his first restless, wandering evening all those years ago: that the indoor hot tub has sign on the entrance purporting it closes at ten, but the door itself never actually locks.

Going there is the private, quiet way that he finally lets himself unwind. But it’s more than that this time.

A baptism of sorts. That’s what this will be. A sauna to burn the sick, hollow feeling out of him now that Leon’s flopping around in his guts.

He has to do something. Has to take control. He has to go back to the way he was before.

As Chris walks down the empty hallway in his swim trunks, bare feet squishing on the fibers of the corridor rug, he imagines that this time, the water will wash Leon off him.

It isn’t fair to make a copy of someone in your mind and cling to them. It isn’t right for him to capture someone’s spirit.

He thinks of Wesker, fucked off however many miles away, for however many years it’s been, and it truly feels like a gaping chunk has been taken out of his soul. He can’t do that to Leon. Leon is not his to do that to.

He will wash the other man off him, and will resolve himself, once again, to be content with costly lunches and shitty break room coffee.

He has before.

He will again.

Chris presses his weight against the exit door and it unlatches with a click, the creak of its hinges echoing throughout the stairwell. His soles touch down on concrete and rubber mats, and he descends three floors, all the way down to the lobby.

As soon as he pushes onto the ground floor corridor, music and chatter spills out from around the corner. There’s the clink of glasses, and the sudden spools of laughter.

He could invite Jill. Or Barry. He could choose not to be alone for once in his fucking life. All he has to do is turn back down the hall and glance out over the lobby to see if anyone who might want to accompany him is there.

Instead, he turns the other way.

When Chris gets to the POOL OPEN 9 A.M. - 10 P.M. sign, the room’s scalloped glass rippling with the crystalline colors of the indoor pool, he worries, for a moment, that when he taps the keycard on the reader, it’ll stay silent, dead, and closed.

Like a message from the universe reading DEAD END, DEAD END, DEAD END.

And then Chris taps, and the door gives a little flitter. Just like every year, the lock clicks, then unlatches, the panel beeping green. The sign once again is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, a privacy curtain designed just for him.

He opens the door, and thick, chlorinated air bowls over him like a wave. Comforting, his mind whispers, strange feelings wrapping around him. Welcoming.

And then Chris steps into the thick of it, and his heart jolts in his chest. Because Leon isn’t just a spectre taking up residence in his imagination. He is also here. Here, in the room.

Past the pool, with head arched back and his arms spread out, Leon lounges in the hot tub alone.

LEON, the universe chirps, suddenly blinking green. Suddenly as warm and humid as a mother’s womb. LEON, it chirps. LEON, LEON.

“Leon,” Chris rasps.

Of course, Leon can’t hear him. Not over the sticky bubbling of the hot tub, the jets rumbling as Leon slices a palm absently along the rolling surface, faced away with half of his hair pulled high up on his head. The back of Leon’s neck is red, pale skin flushed from the heat. His shoulders tighten, then release, rolling back against the rim of the tub. He sighs out and leans back, arching his face to the cool air.

Chris takes in a deep inhale. He conjures up the commander in him.

“Leon,” Chris says.

Leon startles. Caught off guard, he turns, swirling around in the water with his lips parted in question.

He’s like a cool burst of air in a boiling monsoon. The sight of him seeps balm into the toughest cracks in Chris’ soul.

There’s some kind of makeup smudged underneath his eyelids, dark marks streaked by the water. Splotches of pink decorate his collarbones, like beads of coral pressed into his skin, and his hand gingerly slips out of the water to press at that part of his body, wet fingers folding self-consciously into it. He’s not wearing a shirt.

Chris feels fate move syrupy and thick, like a sweltering entity stepping deeper into the room and cloaking them both in ooze.

He clears his throat, and in spite of all the ruminating and suffering and roiling discontent, it’s like his mouth speaks automatically for him, deceptively normal.

“Didn’t take you for a trespasser, rookie,” Chris says.

Shyly, a smile flickers across Leon’s features. “I mean- the keycard works,” he contends easily, falling effortlessly into their routine banter. “It’s not really breaking in if you’re given the tools to do it.”

“Sometimes it is,” Chris shrugs.

Or maybe it’s fate.

It feels like fate.

He wants to tell Leon that he comes here on the last night of the retreat every year, to assure him that he’s not a stalker, not some bloodhound tracing Leon’s scent through the halls to corner him in this tropical helix of a room. But insisting upon that would only make things more awkward, and anyway, his mouth feels thick with moisture as Leon grins, swimming around to fully face him. Long hair spreads silkily around his wet shoulders where the freed strands dip underwater, fanning out. As the room quiets, the hot tub jets decreasing to a humming stillness, the bubbly remains frothed upon the surface press themselves to Leon’s collar bones, concealing the shape of his breasts beneath the waterline.

“Mind if I join you?” Chris asks, his voice coarse as aquarium gravel. “I mean- is that alright? Don't want to impose if you’re enjoying the quiet.”

Peering at him almost meekly over the rim of the tub, Leon nods. “Of course,” he says.

“I usually come here on the last night,” Chris offers, shoulders relaxing a bit. “I noticed the door thing the third or fourth time we were here.”

There. Easy.

Leon nods again. Then smiles politely, cocking his head. “The door thing?”

“Oh. Yeah, it doesn’t lock after ten like it says it does.”

“Ohh,” Leon whooshes out. “I don’t think I read that,” he laughs.

His eyelashes are beaded by water. Chris feels a kick in his groin, pulsing wetly at the sight of him. Shame instantly bucks back, digging its heel into the protrusion of his cock.

He uncords the towel from around his shoulders and drops it onto a plastic lounge chair, one away from where Leon’s left his crumpled t-black shirt and a face-down phone. He’s the one with his tits lobbed off, but he still feels startlingly exposed without something covering him. His hairy chest tries to hide the shiny scarring on his pecs, but the dark curls always thin out around that part of him. Age feels beaten into the hard shapes of his muscles, stomach too-protruding, thighs wearing tightly on his old swim trunks. He resists the urge to coil inward, covering himself.

Chris is old now. Heavy. He is nothing like the spring breeze of the man who basks before him.

He used to be that way.

Is that what Wesker saw in him? A warm-blooded boy flush with starry idealism? Did Wesker covet that? Did he want to siphon it out of his most loyal recruit and spread it like blood over his skin, a serum fresh from the source, meant to keep himself youthful and taut?

All of a sudden, it hits him.

Chris feels dysphoria when he looks at Leon. A milky dysphoria so unlike the one that’s riddled him his whole life. One that reminds him a lot of that ancient thirst for Wesker. One that reminds him of downloading Hinge during insomnia flare ups, or scanning the strangers in the bar for a body that’ll skim the edge off.

There is no shot or patch or gel that could relieve this jagged yearning. There is only basking in the presence of it, and accepting that paltry glow as somehow being enough.

“How long has the department been coming here?” Leon asks, yanking him from his thoughts. He’s still looking up at Chris with those sultry wet racoon’s eyes.

“Uh…” Chris’ face scrunches as he tries to remember. “Years, I guess. Long enough that I stopped counting.” He stops, rubbing a bicep under a nervous palm. “Things are kinda like that at the RPD. Old habits die hard and all that, so. Be careful what kind of traditions you start, be conscious of how long you stay, etcetera.”

“Noted,” Leon smiles. “I won’t start telling people happy hump day any time soon.”

“Thank fuck,” Chris approves gruffly, and he’s surprised to see Leon give a childish giggle in return, the surface of the water spitting its own bubbles back. “You’d have to fight off half the department to be the first to get that one in.”

Happily, Leon swings his gaze away. “There’s gotta be some kind of code I can radio in when things get too blasé.”

A low growl rumbles in Chris’ throat. “God doesn’t even answer those kinds of calls.”

With a mischievous gleam in his eyes now, Leon’s gaze returns, studying Chris with an interest as watery as the surface sloshing around him. “Bet you’d come,” he teases. “Bet you’d come busting through the walls in that tank of yours.”

“Oh, she’s a tank now? That escalated.”

Leon grins.

“Nah,” Chris nips. “I’d just walk across the street to the taco tuesday special every week, just like every other sorry fuck.”

Leon folds his arms across the rim of the hot tub, then rests his chin on them, pouting happily. “You don’t have to anymore. I’ll be around now. We could go get- I dunno, vegan food or something.”

Chris groans, even as excitement blooms hot in his belly. “Please no.”

“Why not?” Leon grins breathily. “At least that’d free your spirit from its shackles.”

“I guess so, Kennedy.” He winces. “Maybe my routine is more like a crib than a cage.”

“Maybe,” Leon smiles. “Leon.”

“Uh.” Chris frowns. “That is your name, yes.”

“I mean, call me Leon. Don’t call me Kennedy.” He rolls his eyes. “Everyone else has already got that covered.”

Chris’ smile softens. “I guess so, Leon,” he amends, his heart beating wetly.

Stepping onto the wet tiles of the platform, Chris feels for a moment too big, looming too far above the sunken pit in which Leon floats. He averts his gaze, because Leon looking up at him is a stroke too much for him to bear, and turns to punch the red button on the wall. He only looks back down, stepping a foot into the tub, when the water begins to bubble, the roaring of the jets giving the room something to echo about.

Leon swims away from the steps, making room, and Chris’ heart rate picks up in his chest. The sweltering heat. The closeness of Leon to him.

He steps down, then sinks the rest of the way, finding a spot on the underwater bench. His body seizes up underneath the water.

Pain sears along the cracks inside of him like a bad knee on a humid day, all of his breaks and wears and tears and legions humming to life in the heat.

And then, so quickly he wants to moan, comes the relief.

That same warmth soothes the inflamed nerves back down, flooding the aches with a glowing medicine. It’s like taking a horse pill during a flare up, liquid light spreading through the pathways of pain.

Chris opens his eyes through the mist and the pain. New, dull throbs travel along his well-trodden aches.

And Leon is still there, just looking at him. He sinks down to his chin, watchful and poised, his nakedness concealed by the thrashing jets.

“I feel really close to you,” Leon says suddenly. Against the water hitting his lips, the confession is as soft as a heart, or as angel wings beating. “Do you… do you feel that too?”

The energy between them hums tenuously, pulsing stronger and then lighter again, not fully sure of itself. Chris can yank on it, or he can sever it through the guts. For now it simply pulses back and forth between them, taut and full of possibility.

“I do,” Chris answers carefully. “I really like you, Leon.”

Leon swallows. “Can I come closer?”

“Yeah,” Chris answers shakily, heart racing. And then, when neither of them move, “No.”

Leon’s brow furrows. He tilts his head, and hurt shines in his eyes. Chris’ heart clenches.

“No?” he repeats quietly.

“It’s just…” In that second, all of the tension breaks. It flakes, then collapses, crumbling into the pool. “It’s just- Leon… we only met a few minutes ago.”

He’s ruined it. He doesn’t know why relief comes rushing into every one of those broken cracks of his body.

And then, to his surprise- he feels it again.

That fate feeling. That humming, self-sure buzzing of connection.

“I know,” Leon whispers back. “I know, I’m sorry, I just- I feel really comfortable around you, Chris. I want to get to know you- I…” His mouth furrows, his frown delicate enough to eat. Against his own will, Chris’ heart pulses lustily. “I really don’t want you to think I have some made up idea of you in my head. I don’t want you to think I’m projecting all this stuff onto you, I just want to get to know you.” He winces, deflating. “Does that make sense?”

It does. So much so that it hurts.

When Chris looks at Leon, he can see the other man's engorged heart pulsing visibly beneath his chest. It’s so full of eager love, Chris can see it overflowing.

He thinks of all the people Leon must have in his life to love, and how there can’t possibly be room for another. His easy sex appeal that cuts like chicken wire. The pureness in his gaze that softens Chris so he can get cleaved right through his middle.

Chris could never ask this man to love him the way he needs to be loved. The best that he could do is sit in the radiance of all of Leon’s exes, and watch the vines of his own jealousy slowly block out the sun.

Just like that, he’s imagining all of the other people that Leon must have loved before, and he is cruelly turned on by the thought of Leon with someone else. Someone better. He thinks of him with his legs spread for someone easy, someone simple, someone who can fuck without pain. In his mind’s eye he sees Leon lascivious and purring, spread out and soft, achingly effortless and easy in a way Chris will never be, and he wants it so bad. He hates it, he hates it, and he wants it so bad. It crushes his heart into his ribs and the marrow seeps, pussy salivating all the way down.

Before he realizes it, he’s moving. Cutting through the water, ribboning the surface into strips.

Their bodies crash together, and for a second Chris can’t tell the water from the silk of Leon’s skin. But the water doesn’t have tits, and it doesn’t have a panting hotness that reaches for him, either.

Chris’ arms splash out of the water, wrapping Leon inside of them, and he opens his mouth to take Leon’s tongue inside of it.

Leon grabs him by the shoulders. A little startled. A lot enthusiastic.

He huffs sweet breaths into Chris’ mouth, squirming. His nipples brush Chris’ chest, and Chris’ cock swells between his legs, aroused in a confused, fitful way.

This is all happening too fast. Chris is making this happen.

He’s orchestrating it. He’s taking Leon’s agency just like Wesker siphoned his, using his constant presence and ready availability to make Leon believe that he actually wants him.

“Woah,” Leon says suddenly, and the sudden tilt of the world has Chris jolting back to awareness.

He’s clenched up, he realizes all at once. His mouth is screwed closed. He has coiled up tightly, his entire body turned to marble, pieces of him sloughing off as the water laps against his middle, weathering him away.

“Sorry,” he whispers.

He can’t open his eyes more than a crack. Between soggy lashes, Leon wavers in front of him, swaying back and forth like a patient, watery ghost.

“Chris…” he asks softly. “What’s wrong?”

Chris shakes his head in a gesture too hard and stunted to really be a no. He feels his chin tuck, crystallized by shame.

After a minute, he opens his mouth to breathe, and lets out a long, slow exhale.

“Leon,” he says finally.

“Y- yes?” Leon asks.

“I could try to help you land a place on STARS,” he offers. “If that’s what you wanted.”

It comes out of him like an impulse. Like a desire to swing swiftly and cut everything down to the guts.

He instantly feels sick.

It’s too big of a gesture; it’s a gift the size of a house. It holds too much weight, and contains too much power. And what’s worse is that he can’t figure out why he’s done it. If it’s because of how badly he wants to have something of value to offer. Or if it’s because he simply wanted to hurt himself.

Either way, he can’t take it back now. Can’t will himself to be any less selfish. Any less destructive.

It doesn’t matter how hard he tries. He is old now, and disgusting, and everything he does will always be wrong.

“It’ll take some rebalancing of the budget,” he goes on, each word another nail in his own stupid fucking coffin. “We’ll have to allocate funds differently, or else request a funding increase, but I have a good relationship with the chief. He’s actually invited me to apply for captain a couple times, I’m pretty sure that-”

“Chris?” Leon asks softly.

As he slowly opens his eyes, blinking wetly into the room, Chris realizes the whooshing of the hot tub jets is gone again. He’s damp, his whole body gone humid in the cold. Gradually, he feels a steadying grip attach itself to his arm. Through the slit in his eyes, he can make out Leon’s hands on his wrists beneath the water, slipping comfortingly up to stroke his forearms.

Leon is so small compared to Chris. He’s so young. Chris can’t be making him do this.

All the same, Chris leans forward, letting Leon take him against his chest. In the absence of all self-control, all he can do is apologize.

“Sorry,” he rumbles, squeezing his eyes shut again. He shakes his head, like he can’t quite believe himself. “I’m sorry about this, Leon.”

“Shh,” Leon tells him, wrapping him up tight.

“Are you gonna be okay?” Leon asks shyly.

Standing at the entrance to Chris’ room, with the door propped open on his foot, Chris watches as Leon looks softly at him, his face kind and searching. Every few seconds his eyes flit over Chris’ shoulders, exploring the room through the open door behind, and a new swirl of excitement dances reluctantly in Chris’ gut.

“No, yeah. For sure.” Chris waves him off, laughing a little. “I’m a big guy, Kennedy. I can take it.”

Leon’s mouth turns up gently. “Leon,” he corrects.

Chris smiles back. “I’m a big guy, Leon.”

Gently, a brush creeps across Leon’s face. In spite of whatever that shitshow in the hot tub just was, Leon still manages to turn his head to the side and squeeze out a happy laugh, cheeks teased with pink. “I’m sure of that, Chris.” He glances down at the phone in his hand, blue light momentarily brightening up his face and taking his attention away. He drops it into his wet pocket and smiles, looking back up. “You want me to leave you alone?”

Despite everything- the mortifying blubbering, the lavish promises, the resistance he feels pulling against his core- when Chris looks at Leon, right now he can only see one truth.

Leon still wants to fuck him.

It is shining in his eyes, and relaxed into his stance. Maybe it should upset him, but it softens Chris out on the inside. It makes all of that flailing and struggling go cushiony and soft.

He has to do this. He just has to. If they don’t fuck, he doesn’t know what kind of psychotic demon he’ll propel out into the world.

So he shakes his head no. He widens his eyes, taking in Leon- all of him- and when Leon takes hold of his hands again, fingers curved, tenderly shaping to fit the large expanse of Chris’ palms, Chris opens his mouth and lets Leon stick his tongue back inside.

Heat immediately flares back down to his groin, pulsing against the plastered-on swim trunks. He’s half naked with the towel around his shoulders, his chest exposed, and when Leon arches upward to lick hungrily at the roof of his mouth, the damp t-shirt that he’d thrown on doesn’t hold his breasts back from pressing into Chris’ pecs.

Chris leans forward. A groan slips out of his throat.

Sweet, exploring hands dance up and down his arms, pricking gooseflesh up Chris’ spine, and all at once, Chris releases himself from his cage. He lets go of the levee, and all the sewage beating its fists from behind the walls comes crashing out in a wave.

“Come in?” he begs fitfully, fists wrapping tight around the shoulders of Leon’s t-shirt. “Will you come in? Leon?”

Leon’s breath catches. He seems to gloss over with a surprised hazy pinkness, looking up at Chris with thirsty eyes. In his silence, Chris’ fists wind tighter around the knots of fabric, clenching desperately, and Leon seems to dissolve into static.

“Fuck,” he whispers, floating into Chris’ grasp. His eyelashes flutter weakly, and Chris feels his own fists tighten around skin.

“Fuck,” Leon pants again, eyes glazed, his breath shallow. “Chris,” he whines back. “Yes.” He nips hungrily at Chris’ lip, snarling a little, “Do it.”

All bark and no bite, Chris thinks fondly. Just for show, the same way his guarded, defiant eyes were a first-impression performance. Leon comes off like a mountain cat, but inside, he’s just as fluffy as he seems.

Slippery feet walk him backwards into the room, Chris’ own steps uncoordinated and heavy. He barely registers the door clicking shut behind them as his body collapses back onto the bed and Leon’s delicate hands cup his face, the younger man crawling up and onto him like a worm squirming out of rain-soaked soil.

Panting, Chris twists underneath him, hands sliding up Leon’s back to cradle around his head. Long, damp hair waterfalls into his palms, and he grabs onto the strands tightly, gripping the other man as if he could hold onto him forever.

Above him, twisting and whining, Leon exudes lust.

It’s his t. Chris can smell it.

It drips from his pores, evaporating in the heat of his skin and diffusing into the air. Chris thinks of how viciously horny he must be, and remembers the feeling entirely too well. Like a desperate akathisia to burst out of your skin, leaving a chalky residue behind.

His ego swells to know that he is not the only bloodhound in the room. Leon’s libido chose him to hunt down, tracking him to this very spot.

The balloon in Chris’ chest keeps expanding, stretching and squeaking. Then, all at once, the latex bursts.

Rotted pleasure and awful fantasies rain down like shredded confetti, and just like that, Chris’ mind is a vortex of horrible visions again. Leon courting others; Leon following his dick from one warm body to the next; Leon moving onto the next man or woman who steps into his path.

“You’re so sexy,” Leon laughs, the words breathy against his lips, and in that moment Chris realizes how tight his fists have gotten. He lets go of Leon’s hair, jerking back in stricken apology.

“No,” Leon whispers, shaking his head. Those too-soft hands seek Chris’ back out again, placing his palms back down on his skull.

So angelic. Leon’s halo is drippy and askew, a shade of white not made in the same batch as purity. He grins, laughter leafing through his teeth. Dreamlike. “No, I like it.”

More cautiously this time, Chris collects a thick curl of Leon’s locks, winding it around his hand like a boxer wrapping his knuckles before the fight. When he pulls it, seizing Leon’s lips in a kiss, the younger man gasps.

Satisfaction flares hot in Chris’ groin. Leon whines in pain, but refuses to let that break the kiss.

“Leon,” Chris pants, his pussy throbbing between his thighs. He feels himself clenching, walls spilling wet inside, and he lets out a helpless gasp in frustration, wishing for the sensation of blood pooling in a cock instead. Still, the cock he does have twitches, straining against the hood of his clit. Leon has to feel it. Squirming all over him, licking sloppy kisses across his jaw, his lips- Chris arches back in the bed and groans out, bucking up at the man on top of him.

“Wait,” he pleads breathily after a moment, struggling to swallow down air. “Wait, wait.”

Kindly, Leon draws back, taking a moment to regard him. Grey eyes gaze at him like deer in a nature reserve, the bridge of his nose spattered with fawn’s freckles, and Chris’ heart twists. It bleeds with the truth that they’ve only just met. It pounds in this throat, this desire to be loved. It beats in his temple, the truth of how long it takes one to come to love another.

He’s never let it last long enough to try. Because his relationships aren’t balloons. They are pinatas, and he swings with all his might to beat the satisfaction out of them, leaving them crumpled and broken on the floor of the party.

Waveringly, the room comes into focus.

The hum of the air conditioner, chilling the sweat on his skin. The dark blue atmosphere, broken only by the lamp in the corner, pushing light into the shadows. Chris turns, feeling for the remote control that’s prodding at his hip somewhere beneath the topsheet. He finds it, then throws his head to the side, stabbing on whatever show he’d been using to fill the emptiness.

The crackle of gunfire fills the hotel room.

His eyes are drawn back when he suddenly notices Leon shaking his head, mouth wiggled into a sympathetic smile.

“What?” Chris asks.

“You don’t have to do that,” Leon offers quietly. “I mean, I’d rather you didn’t. I don’t wanna be distracted.”

Chris nods. He sticks his arm back out, angling it at the tv, and compromises by turning the volume low.

“Just for the light,” he explains, even though he doesn’t fully put it on mute.

Chris feels, in the quiet, his face being gathered back into Leon’s hands. This time, he doesn’t internally fight it. This time, he lets himself be manhandled by someone he could probably break in two, privately aching for the gentleness of Leon’s movements.

All too suddenly he is face-to-face with Leon again.

“Hi,” Chris exhales, not sure what else to say.

“Hi,” Leon chimes back.

The bed is so soft beneath him, and Leon is so warm above, sinking down to fall between Chris’ open legs. Chris opens his mouth and closes his eyes, and then Leon’s tongue is back inside of his mouth, working at his resolve like the slippery thing he is.

Just for a moment, Chris lets himself float in the blue waves of the television screen, body bobbing up and down. The surface ripples all around him, an inky shade of black that still manages to hold its watery lightness, glittering beneath the paleness of the moon.

Memories of Wesker float all around him, dropped into the sea like ill-timed rations.

He remembers everything.

Everything, but scattered into pieces.

Hands tied behind his back, his knees on the tile. Chin arched up, held between pinched fingers, pinned down by a boring gaze. Wesker’s eyes so blue that they were somehow almost red, like a snow-white rabbit in the glare of the moonlight. Riling Chris up and then sending him back out to work, so that he’d drool all over himself for the rest of his shift, fingers on his cock in the bathroom stall.

Daddy. God.

The picture of everything Chris ever wanted to be.

“Ah,” he moans, eyes unsticking open when Leon starts thrusting at his thighs, the younger man making whimpering sounds.

The arguments. The fighting.

Fine! Chris remembers shouting, his voice breaking. So loud that Wesker’s careful facade recoiled, eyes darting harshly to the locked office door. Chris hadn’t cared. Hadn’t had the wherewithal to care. His heart had been bleeding all over his hands, bile coming up like fire from his throat. So tired of all that sexual pleasure, and no love. So exhausted by the dead ends, the submission, the begging for commitment, the desperate scrapping for something from Wesker that could fill the gaping emptiness inside him.

I’ll tell everyone! he yells at himself from the echoes of his mind. I’ll tell Irons- see what’ll happen to you, Captain. You’ll be sorry you wouldn’t just love me.

In that moment he’d been blazing, unable to slow down for a second of reflection. Afterwards, he’d been shameful. Leaving the office crying, his head hung all the way to the floor, not even stopping to look up and see who was in the office at the time.

He was sure Jill had heard. Fuck, that they’d all heard. But Jill in particular… after that, she had always looked at him different.

When Wesker left town, he didn’t look back. Not a glance through a sunglass lens in the rearview mirror, not a letter in the mail, even an email apology. And Chris’ knees had been too sore from all that supplicating on the ground. He hadn’t had the strength to get up and chase him.

In the end, that sick, empty part of him knows the truth: it hadn’t been Wesker’s fault.

It wasn’t his fault that Chris had agreed to an arrangement that he’d known full-well would destroy him. It wasn’t Wesker’s fault that he couldn’t love him.

It wasn’t Wesker’s fault that even if he could have, it wouldn’t have filled the hole that Chris had so, so desperately needed it to.

Nothing ever would have. And nothing ever did.

Not even becoming a man could do it.

In one motion, Chris grabs Leon’s wrist, lifting it above his head. He pulls Leon’s sleeve out of the way, and then, without a warning even to himself, he shoves his face into Leon’s armpit.

‘C-Chris,” Leon struggles above him, letting out a surprised whine as Chris laps a long, hungry lick across the sensitive stretch of flesh.

In his mind, Wesker disappears. All of it does. He eats the hole in his chest alive, using Leon’s body as his offering.

Soft hair traps the taste of old sunscreen and briny sweat. Chris’ breathing goes ragged, free arm wrapping around Leon’s waist to squeeze him by the ass. He sucks in the smell of the younger man and pheromones dance around his head, cock pulsing so hard that his uterus knots painfully. A gasp wrenches itself from his own throat as he licks and sucks, feeling Leon twist and whimper above him, the need to please him, to submit to him, vibrating every cell in his body.

All at once he draws back, seeking approval in Leon's eyes.

He finds it. It’s there.

The younger man is a glowing shade of pink, lust making him shaky. His teeth clutch his bottom lip and his eyebrows furrow, overwhelmed splotches blushing his blemishless skin. With a frown of need warbling on his face, Leon hooks his fingers in the other sleeve and exposes his right armpit, silently begging for the other one to be pleasured.

Chris is more than happy to oblige. He seizes the patch of skin and sucks, rolling his tongue around the flesh clenched between his teeth, and Leon moans so sweetly that it sounds almost like he’s crying.

“Chris,” he begs again, arching back like it’s just too much. Still, his own trembling grasp forces his arm to stay in place.

Chris remembers the desperate rutting effect of testosterone again, and hot ripples course through his belly. He wants to make Leon need him. He wants to wrap his fingers around Leon’s hormones and wind them up so tightly up that Leon needs to explode.

Wesker had used it as a tool to make him yearn, with tender kisses, and not-all-there touches, with teasing glances and stretched-out fulfillment. Such sweet torture. He had Chris so well-trained that after a while, Wesker’s cock was all that mattered to him. Making Wesker happy was all he needed to be good for. And for a while, that made him happy too. Until the very moment when it didn’t.

He won’t do that to Leon. He doesn’t want to do that to him.

All Chris wants is to give him everything he needs. Everything he never got to have.

“Is this okay?” he asks as his hands trail down, cupping Leon’s breasts through the black of his t-shirt.

“Mhmmf,” Leon whines, nodding so hard that hair falls into his screwed-shut eyes. He’s still not letting go of the previous act, arm twisting to lather Chris’ tongue all over his armpit, even when Chris’ motions have calmed down.

Distracted, Chris offers lazy, tasting strokes as takes Leon’s pecs into his hands. Nipples peak through the fabric to kiss the calluses on Chris’ palms, and he can’t help it- he squeezes, leaning up to kiss another flurry of whimpers from Leon’s lips.

It’s hard to tell how much of it is performative. Chris tries not to dwell.

“I want to-” Leon huffs hot breaths against his face. “To do something for you- Chris-”

“You are,” Chris whispers back. “Don’t worry.”

He bites gently at Leon’s neck, pulling the skin away from bone, then dips down to drag his face along the fibers of Leon’s t-shirt.

A puffy nipple strains against the fabric, spilling between the grip of Chris’ fingers. He opens his mouth and takes it inside, sucking at the hardened peak through the cover of Leon’s shirt.

Leon grabs him by the back of his neck, keening as he coils up against him.

Saliva soaks through the t-shirt, every suck and lick materializing the feeling of Leon’s nipple on his tongue. Between his legs, Leon bucks his hips, thrusting at Chris’ groin before finally giving up and mounting his leg, his thighs wrapping tight around Chris’ own.

Sparks rain through Chris’ body like a near-death call with a live wire.

He probably wants a dick to fuck. His insides are probably clenching around air, miserable that the best Chris can offer is a muscled leg to hump like a dog. Somehow, that makes Chris feel even hotter. More desperate to please.

Once again, Leon takes control. He grabs the bottom of his shirt and pulls it up, face furrowed with a mix between apology and desperation, and exposes his tits. Arched back, thighs gripping Chris’ legs, it’s almost like he’s showing them off, the search for Chris’ opinion written all over his face.

For the first time Chris gets a good look at them, and mixed feelings go racing white-hot down his core.

Leon’s pecs are small enough to not need to bind, but still so round and pretty that he has to wonder how they’ve been hiding in plain sight this whole time. His nipples are puffy, pink, like peach flesh, the creamy skin ribbed by goosebumps. Leon shivers, holding his shirt to his collar bones, and Chris looks up at his face.

“Is it okay?” Leon whispers tremblingly, dragging his clit back and forth over Chris’ thigh in small rocking motions even as he waits for an answer. “Do you mind them?”

Comfortingly, Chris reaches up and places his hand on the side of Leon’s face.

“Leon,” he says, mouth dry. He licks his lips to wet them, and watches Leon swallow as he tracks the motion with his eyes. “They’re hot,” he huffs out promisingly. “You’re hot.”

Leon’s eyes widen, then soften again. Chris reassuringly strokes the apples of his cheek with his thumb before pressing it to the wet puff of his bottom lip.

“You don’t-” Leon stammers against Chris’ thumb. “You don’t think it’s gross?”

Gently, Chris collects a knot of Leon’s shirt into his hand. Then he raises it up, gently feeding it into Leon’s willing mouth.

“No,” he says honestly. “It makes me want to fuck you.”

Leon closes his eyes, thighs tightening around Chris’ leg. He nods eagerly, clenching his teeth around the fabric pushed into his mouth, and starts to bounce up and down on Chris’ leg, whines of effort bleeding into the fabric.

Whines turn into moans as Chris takes Leon’s entire breast into his mouth and sucks, circling his tongue around the nipple.

“Yes,” Leon muffles out.

“Yes?” Chris repeats.

“Yes,” Leon whimpers back. He thrusts back and forth, fucking his tit into Chris’ mouth, chasing the kinds of sensations that would’ve had Chris wanting to hot-poker his tits off if someone tried to do this to him before he’d gotten them removed.

Leon draws back, dutifully holding onto the t-shirt with his mouth, but Chris can still hear it when he suddenly begs, “Bite it? Bite it?”

Unsure at first, Chris hesitates.

“S’okay,” Leon tells him. “Promise.”

Chris latches his teeth around Leon’s nipple, then bites down, jaw squeezing only hard enough to pinch. Above him, Leon makes a sound like a kitten squealing over milk.

“Thank you,” Leon moans breathily, still thrusting himself haphazardly on Chris’ leg. “Thank you, Chris.”

Against the powdery sweetness of Leon’s taste, another wave of cesswater rolls through Chris’ gut, making everything taste like sewage. His brain strobes, flashing unwittingly with those same demonic images.

Leon so horny from the hormones that he can’t help but pounce on the next willing thing in the room. Leon mounting pillows and dildos, his brain a swirling mass of bodies hypnotized by acts on a screen. Leon making pacts with friends who just want to help him out and can’t say no to someone like him, Leon scrolling dating profiles, whispering low on the phone until he sweet-talks himself into their apartments, asking them to do things Chris would never be comfortable with trying.

Leon, who looks queer in a way only this generation does. Who straddles the line of gender presentation, and could make anyone with any kind of preference yearn and drool. Fresh, and young. Modern and irresistible. So different from the hardened shell of manhood that casts Chris as if he were just some regular, average dude.

But isn’t that what he always wanted? To just be seen as a man?

Not anything in between. Not to wear bright, colorful board shorts with binders and shave the sides of his head and dye them pastel colors. Not fluid, or androgynous. Just a man. Indistinguishable from any other.

Boring. Simple. Perfect.

So then why does he feel so inadequate now? Why does it feel like he’s too old to have what he never realized he even wanted, back when he was young enough to be allowed to have it?

Why does it sit cold as a seed in the pit of his belly? Why does the aftertaste of all those hormones taste not like the burst of juicy delight it once did, but now, like a cold stone of grief?

“Chris,” Leon laughs, dropping the shirt out of his teeth. “Hurts.”

“Oh-” Chris unlatches his teeth, pulling quickly back. When he looks up, sure that every thought is written horribly on his face, he finds that the laugh lines at the kisses of Leon’s eyes still only shine with glee.

“I’m sorry,” Chris says sheepishly, shrinking back into himself. “I didn’t realize.”

“No, it’s alright.” Leon shrugs, a flippant ease in his posture, like he’s been loosened up by pleasure. “Free top surgery I guess.”

That needling, inadequate feeling crawls back into Chris’ belly, puncturing the thrill of his lust. “Leon-” he starts.

Leon wavers at the sudden intensity in Chris’ voice, his breezy grin not sobering as much as it softens into curiosity.

“Why…” Chris tries, wincing. “Why do you even like me?”

He doesn’t mean for it to sound so pathetic, but of course it does. Rasping, and desperate, especially for a man his age. The unspoken brought to light in a way that’s against the rules.

Leon’s brow furrows, confusion warping his face.

“I mean,” Chris goes on, “You’re so…”

For a second, Leon’s face stays clouded in confusion. Then, slowly, it smoothes back out, a responsive inquisitiveness taking over his expression.

“I’m so what?” he asks patiently.

“So… wanted,” Chris finishes.

Leon laughs out in surprise. “By who?”

“By. I don’t know.” Chris flounders, coming up short. He realizes that answering that question would mean having to spill the contents of his mind, and he doesn’t even fucking know this guy well enough at all for it to be appropriate. He doesn’t know Leon’s exact age. If he brushes his teeth at night or knows how to cook an egg. He doesn’t know if he’s single, or dating, or if the two of them are even compatible in any way that matters.

Explaining would mean telling him that he has a picture built up of a stranger in his head. And it would mean asking something of Leon that you don’t even ask your partner until you’re sure they’re committed to you for life.

Chris winces harder, leaning back onto the bed and propping himself up on his elbows. Across the room, the eggwash of the flickering tv dances over their skins, a fuzzy shade of blue, like a poltergeist too old and weak to throw shit around anymore. The air conditioner churns, eating up the sound of a car chase on tv, and Chris swallows his pride before trying again, flailing for some way to ease the jaggedness in his gut.

“You’re just- I mean- you’re so… desirable.”

“You are too,” Leon says in a syrupy voice.

Even swallowing feels awkward in the quiet. “No, I’m… not,” Chris says. “I’m barely a person anymore. At some point I might have had something to offer, but now I’m just. This.”

“Hey,” Leon says softly, eyebrows furrowed. “Stop being mean to yourself. You’ve got plenty going for you.”

On their own accord, Chris’ eyes screw up tight. He turns his head, hiding like a toddler from Leon’s sympathy.

“Don’t,” he warns gruffly. “Don’t do that. I’m not looking for someone to make a list of what’s good about me, I just.” He sighs out an exhale. “I just want you to know what you’re getting into, Leon. I’m not much of anything these days.”

For a moment, Leon is quiet, eyes searching Chris like fluttering butterflies. Then, he smiles. “You’re big,” he suggests, shrugging a little. His hand trails along the curve of Chris’ broad shoulders. “You’re bold, and confident.” Leon huffs out a laugh. “You definitely know what you’re doing in bed. You… come off like that all the time, really.”

“Leon-” Chris protests through ailing eyes.

“No,” Leon says with false lightness. “It’s not compliments. Just observations.”

“Still,” Chris whispers.

“You’re strong, and bitter.” Now Leon grins crookedly, his angled canines gleaming. “But I like bitter.”

“Leon,” Chris protests again.

“You have a lot of institutional knowledge.”

This time, he barks out a laugh. “Alright,” he accepts.

“You’re a good kisser,” Leon flirts.

“Now you’re just lying.”

“Hmm,” Leon returns, chest rising with laughter, as he takes Chris’ face into his hands. Soft palms cup his face, and then even softer lips press over his own, gently lifting his apart so he can press his tongue inside.

All of a sudden, Chris imagines that same tongue licking nervously at his cock, and he rears up, grabbing Leon hard around the back of his neck.

Leon squeals, delighted, and it makes Chris want to keep grabbing him harder.

“See?” Leon grins, “I think you’re just in your head, maybe.”

Chris growls, wishing he could be in Leon’s head. Wishing he could just know what the other man is thinking, and have the whole terrible game wrapped up already.

“Touch me more?” Leon begs, thrusting his hips forward again. “You don’t have to,” he quickly adds, “But-”

Chris’ iron grasp loosens enough for hand to break free, sliding down Leon’s back. It snakes low to his hips, circling around to Leon’s front- and then it slips down the soft curve of Leon’s belly, and slides in to rest between his legs.

“Like this?” Chris asks.

In lieu of an answer, Leon gasps into his mouth.

Beneath his swim shorts, Leon’s pussy pulses hot through his clothing, the muscles contracting at Chris’ touch. There’s wet, open warmth, but it’s the small swell of a dick that Leon thrusts against Chris’ hand, engorged by bloodflow in a way that’s apparent even through the polyester.

Chris licks a haphazard stripe up the length of Leon’s jaw. Then he seizes the tip of Leon’s ear between his teeth and turns his head to the side so he can lick hungrily at the shell of his ear.

“Oh,” Leon exhales, eyes closing as he moans. “Oh,” he repeats, thrusting at Chris’ hand.

His breathing takes on a rhythm of its own. Falling in time, Chris fucks his ear with his tongue, dissolving into the manic thrusting and Leon’s ragged gasps.

Without thinking, Chris’ hand strays lower, towards that opening gushing with heat and slick. He starts pressing his fingers against the fabric, pushing against Leon’s entrance, when all of a sudden the younger man startles, head rearing up as fast as his grip snaps around Chris’ wrist, yanking Chris’ hand away.

“Leon-” Chris starts, as Leon huffs out a nervous laugh.

“Sorry, sorry,” Leon rushes out, breathing hard as he lets go of Chris’ wrist. “No, it’s okay. I’m sorry. It just freaks me out there a little.”

Shame colors Chris’ face. “I’m sorry. I should have asked.”

“No, I wasn’t exactly…” Leon meets his eye and then laughs again, a blush doing laps around the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t give you a lot of time to bring it up. Or brief you on exactly what I was asking for.”

“I won’t do it again,” Chris promises.

“Yeah, thank you.” The top and bottom of Leon’s grin rubs together, his eyes blinking bashfully as he turns them away. “I guess I don’t really like… penetration.” He winces at the word, then laughs again. “All that stuff kinda freaks me out.”

“I understand,” Chris answers softly.

“Do you mind it?” Leon asks suddenly. “Knowing there’s an inside of you like that? I mean. Does it bother you too, or do you think it’s just a- me thing?”

Chris chews it over. Frowns. “I dunno. It’s not really any different from having a throat, is it? Or any of the other…”

“No,” Leon cuts in, bashfully giggling. “No, those freak me out too. Orifices, am I right?”

“I like being fucked.”

Chris isn’t sure why he says it. It just sort of boils out, like he’s afraid that Leon will reject him for it. If he does, he’d rather come out swinging, full force, so that it can happen now.

“Anywhere, really,” he goes on, grimacing at himself. “I like- nevermind, I’m gonna shut my fucking mouth.”

But Leon is just grinning at him curiously, eyes narrowed, head tipped to its side so that a splash of dirty blonde hair falls over his face.

“No,” he says slowly, interested. “Go on.”

Chris growls. “Nah,” he answers.

Leon waits a second before giving up.

“I’ve never really fucked anyone before,” he admits, shrugging. “In any way, I guess.” For a second, Chris isn’t sure what the takeaway is. And then Leon says, “I’d… like to learn? I mean, I definitely wouldn’t… mind it.”

Then Leon hiccups out a laugh, eyes spearing down at the sheets again. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “That’s pretty forward, huh.”

Something inside of Chris aches so hard that he almost reaches out. He almost tells Leon what he’s feeling. The unfounded fears, the inappropriate expectations. But Leon looks so sweet, so innocent at his core, and Chris finds he just can’t put that all on him.

So he swallows it all back down.

The expression on Leon’s face is odd all of a sudden. “What do you think…” he starts, “About…”

Chris blinks his thoughts away. “About?” he repeats blankly.

“About… me,” Leon says shyly.

All of a sudden, it clicks. “Oh,” Chris says.

“I know it’s small,” Leon cringes. “I’ve always been self-conscious about that.”

“You’re on t, aren’t you?” Chris hears himself answering quickly. “It’ll get bigger.”

That’s not really the response that Leon wanted. Chris can see the sheepish pry for praise, not feedback, on Leon’s face.

“It felt nice,” Chris amends, hoping he’s not as awkward as he feels.

“But did it feel like a dick?” Leon says shyly.

“Yes, Leon. I’d like to jerk you off. If you’d like”

Leon’s blush intensifies. Still, his fingertips slowly dip down to Chris’ waist instead of offering an answer. He traces the waistband of Chris’ swim trunks, face suddenly twisted in deep concentration. “Could I see you?” he blurts out. “I don’t have to touch you if you’re not into that. I’d just… really like to see. If that’s okay.”

Chris’ fights off the asshole urge to ask if he wants a dick measuring contest.

“For research?” Chris deadpans, which honestly isn’t any better.

But Leon just smiles, unoffended by Chris’ coarseness.

“No… when I was humping you like an animal-” He laughs, rolling his eyes. “It felt so huge. Is it always like that?”

“It gets hard,” Chris explains. “When I’m turned on.”

Despite his sudden shyness, Leon looks distinctly pleased. “Can I see?” he asks.

Quietly, Chris nods, his heart thrumming against his ribs.

“Just-” he warns. “Don’t compare yourself to me, alright? I’ve had decades that you haven’t even lived yet.”

“That’s not why, I promise.”

“Okay.”

What am I doing? Chris thinks flutteringly as his hands find the waistband of his trunks, testing the tautness of the elastic snapped around his hips. Chlorine fumes cling to the nylon, sitting heavy in the back of his sinuses, and Chris knows that from now on, whenever he smells a pool, this is the moment he’ll be brought back to.

Leon watches intently as Chris lifts his ass and slips out of his swim trunks, peeling the fabric off where it clings to his thighs.

“Chris-” he says. His fingers twitch, indecisive, as his eyes confidently scan the t-dick that protrudes from between Chris’ legs, cockhead swollen and red, lifting itself out of the folds of Chris’ anatomy like some prideful, self-made thing.

He likes to think that his life hasn’t all been about growing a cock. But still, to this day, his heart swells with lion-like pride when he looks down between his legs. If nothing else can sum him up, he’d happily let this do the work.

Or maybe Chris is just a sentimental fuck, and he just has years of pumping to thank for it.

Leon is still staring, and Chris winces, an unexpected burst of shame barreling through his confidence. “Sorry,” he rumbles lowly.

“Sorry- for what?” Leon asks distractedly, eyes flying up to his face.

“I’m not sure,” he says honestly.

In truth, he’s ashamed of how horny he is. Of how desperately he wants Leon to touch him, to get him off. Of how badly he wants to take Leon by the back of his head and pull him down by his hair, put his mouth on his cock, and ask him to suck.

Between his legs, his cock leaps at the fantasy, and Chris winces even as his pussy pulses deep inside.

“I like it when you’re dominant,” Leon admits suddenly, looking flushed. “Please don’t worry.”

“I just don’t want to hurt anyone,” Chris says quietly.

“You won’t. I’d tell you.”

“I can get really… overwhelming,” he admits.

“It’s okay, Chris,” Leon insists more impassionedly. “I trust you.”

Chris’ mouth furrows, eyebrows knitting tight. Somehow, that makes it worse. More dangerous. The fact that Leon is the kind of man who can willingly trust someone he just met.

“I mean,” Leon goes on, babbling, his words pouring like water over the hot stones in Chris’ heart, “You could tear me apart and I probably wouldn’t mind. But I know you wouldn’t. I just want you to know there’s nothing to be scared of.”

Thorns root themselves in Chris’ soul, wrapping so tightly he can hardly breathe.

Leon is so innocent. So hopeful. And Chris won’t be the one to destroy that.

It will be taken away from him. One day, it will be ripped from his youth the same way it is eventually taken from everyone, but he won’t be the reason why. He just won’t.

If Chris can’t be sure of anything else, he can be sure of that.

“I would never hurt you,” he promises.

“I know,” Leon smiles. “I trust you.”

In one motion, Chris seizes his hand.

Leon looks surprised for a second. Then his expression shifts, going intensely lustful, the gray of his eyes turning cloudy and hungered. He lets out a sound as Chris pulls his hand between his legs, fingers splayed as Chris slots them in, pressing them up against his opening.

“Does this freak you out?” he grunts.

Tongue pressed between his lips like an obedient puppy, Leon shakes his head. He looks down at Chris’ waist, then turns his hand, angling his fingertips against Chris’ entrance.

Chris looks up, meeting Leon’s eyes. They are unsure, and asking; Chris answers for them.

Slowly, he pulls Leon’s hand against the muscle of his hole, pressing Leon’s fingertips inside. The younger man’s eyes go wide, paralyzed in wonder, and Chris asks him, “Is this okay?”

“Yes,” Leon whispers back.

“Good,” Chris says. Then he finishes pulling Leon’s wrist towards him, pulling until three of Leon’s fingers pop down to the knuckle.

Chris’ walls clench instantly around the insertion, and he groans, squeezing his thighs.

“Oh,” Leon breathes.

Chris’ grasp loosens only to circle back around, gripping Leon from a better angle. With his wrist secured, he starts pumping Leon’s hand back and forth, driving his fingers in and out until his hole is clenched hard around Leon’s knuckles.

“Chris,” Leon pants. He’s on his knees, one palm propping him up, and through the lens of pleasure, Chris can see his hips jerking back and forth, tiny thrusting motions that he’s making against the air.

It’s not enough, but somehow that makes Chris even crazier. His inner walls flutter, uterus clenching with the desire for something pounding up against it. He rides Leon’s fingers, trying to fulfill the ache, and when he can’t take it anymore, he pulls Leon’s fingers out, hole squelching at the loss.

“Woah,” Leon says breathlessly, examining the hand still clutched in Chris’ grasp. “I’ve never felt anything like that before.”

Strings of slick spiderweb across his hand, clean nails shiny, the darker edges of his fingertips wet. Holding Leon’s gaze through his lashes, Chris pulls Leon’s fingers to his mouth and licks the precome off them.

“Does it feel good?” Leon asks shakily.

Tongue slotted between Leon’s forefinger and middle, Chris nods.

“I never really connected to that concept,” Leon admits. “Being inside another person. But it feels nice. It’s kind of, like… soft, and warm.”

Again, Chris nods. Leon pinkens at the way he pulls his fingertips towards the back of his throat, tongue laving the rest of the slick off.

“Chris?” he asks hurriedly. “Can I try sucking you off?”

At that, Chris stops. He looks at Leon with his fingers swallowed down his throat, and his cock knots painfully between his legs, body throbbing inside and out.

It’s been so long since anyone’s offered. He wants it so bad he’s sure he could die.

Shyly, Leon huffs out a laugh. “Just to warn you, I’m not sure how good I’ll be.”

Leon’s fingers leave his mouth with a pop. “You don’t have to be good,” he murmurs lowly, dick pounding between his legs. “I don’t judge that kind of thing.”

Leon’s blush is colored purple by the glow of the tv screen. “Is it really okay?”

Chris nods, pulse drumming in his throat. “Please, Leon,” he says hoarsely.

A flash of interest sparks in Leon’s face. His hips pump infinitesimally again, thrusting at the air, and if Chris weren’t so desperate for a mouth on his cock, he would reach out and grab Leon’s hips, pull him forward, and make him sit on his face.

Instead, he shuffles backwards, opening his legs, breath holding in his lungs as Leon repositions down until he’s settled right between Chris’ thighs.

Hair falls around Leon’s shoulders, tickling Chris’ groin, and Leon huffs a little in apologetic laughter as he tucks it back behind his ear.

For just a moment, the world narrows. Chris’ entire life focuses in just on this: Leon on his belly, squirming to get comfortable, his breaths hot and fluttering as they hit Chris’ crotch, fingers electrifying in their softness as they settle on each inner thigh.

Leon leans down again, his face now so close to his cock that Chris wants to thrust up at his lips, and another curtain of hair falls into his face.

“Chris?” he says sheepishly, looking up.

Blood pulses in his dick at the way Leon gazes up at him from between his thighs. He nods, grabbing Leon’s hair into his hand and pulling it back behind his head.

“Thank you,” Leon laughs. Then his teeth catch his lip. “A little harder?”

For a second, Chris isn’t sure what he means. Then he realizes, and he tightens his fist, turning his grasp into a proper clamp.

Leon jolts, a pleased expression breaking out all over his face. He strains his head back like he’s pulling against Chris’ grip, and moans happily when Chris doesn’t relent.

“You can be rough with me,” Leon rasps. “I’ll tell you, Chris, I promise.”

Breathlessly, Chris nods.

He threads his fingers through the tight ponytail he’s created at the back of Leon’s scalp, no longer holding his hair back as much as he’s holding onto it. Sweaty palms twitch as he fights the urge to push Leon’s head down, cock straining up to meet Leon’s sweet breaths as he explores it with his eyes.

Chris can feel how engorged he is, cockhead exposed and throbbing for touch. He waits for an experimental touch, a testing lick, a nervous kiss.

Instead, Leon leans down and wraps his lips around Chris’ cock.

Warm pleasure floods up Chris’ spine, making him tense.

His feet curl, muscles tightening, and somewhere deep inside of him, his uterus gives a painful clench. Old injuries rush to the surface, long-ago fractures and breaks sparking new inside his body. If he was alone, he’d go rooting for a pair of tight socks to squeeze around his ankles so that the blood doesn’t pound so achingly into his feet, but he settles, instead, for grabbing Leon’s hair in both his fists.

“Y- yes,” he groans, eyes bolting tight. For a second, he just lets himself sit in the warmth of Leon’s cheek, cock twitching and throbbing. Then he grips Leon hard by the hair and starts pumping him up and down on it, frogging his legs so that his thighs spread as wide as his tired muscles will let them go.

Inside the other man’s mouth, Chris feels Leon’s tongue slip down, pressing between his folds. Then it licks its way up to Chris’ tip, circling over the sensitive pile of nerves, and Chris moans like hot bile is grating up and out of his chest.

“Leon,” he begs, fighting every urge screaming at him to fuck Leon’s mouth. “More- please.”

Leon’s cheeks hollow, and suddenly the suction is so intense that the pleasure makes it to Chris’ head. Sparks burst behind his eyes, blacking out his thoughts. He gasps roughly, straining back against the mattress, and below him, the springs of the mattress and the bones in his spine pop loudly at the motion.

It’s too soon, but he doesn’t care. His uterus clamps the way it has since his first few years on testosterone, and he tries, as always, to imagine it like his balls tightening in preparation of release.

On the precipice, or right after, Chris usually likes to fuck himself as hard as he can, filling that empty clenching with something it can hold onto. But Leon as starts bobbing his head up and down on Chris’ cock, this time, he’s thinking of the opposite.

He’s thinking of pinning Leon down on his back, shoving his face into his neck, and thrusting every precious inch of himself into Leon’s untouched hole.

Then his mind reels its way back, shame drooling hot all down his core. No. Leon doesn’t like that. His mind pushes the desire away, wrong to even think about.

In compromise, he imagines his cock pressed up against it. Not inside, but close enough to kiss the edges of Leon’s wet, spilling opening. He imagines his dick pulsating, coming all over Leon’s entrance, teased over the edge by the warm fantasy of fucking him, while Leon gazes up at him tremblingly, desperate for his own release.

“Don’t stop,” he hears, and realizes that he’s the one begging. “Leon,” he pleads, “Don’t stop.”

Leon hums in response; Chris’ hand slides down, cupping the back of Leon’s neck. He strokes his thumb across the smaller man’s throat, gently encouraging, his consciousness spiraling as his body gives way to pleasure.

Vaguely, he feels his dick twitching and leaping, spilling into Leon’s mouth. Even if it’s just his pussy gushing from the inside. Even if it’s just an illusion.

Leon makes him feel like he has come to swallow. Leon makes his whole body go glowing-bright with a feeling of rightness.

He quickly pulls Leon’s head away, though gently, guilt and shame like twin thieves rushing in to steal the moment from him.

“You okay?” he huffs raggedly, searching Leon’s sticky lips, his dewy eyes, for any harm, or hurt, or betrayal.

Instead, what he finds is lust. Hot, heavy need curtained across Leon’s face.

Without a word, Leon grabs Chris’ arm and scrambles up onto it, hooking his thighs around the hairy musculature of Chris’ forearm.

“Mhhh,” Leon puffs out, arching his spine back as he thrusts back and forth on Chris’ arm.”Chris,” he moans, voice softening like a girl’s. “You’re so big. I want to be as big as you.”

Even with his cock softening out, Chris feels himself throb at the words, head going hot at the way Leon seems to unravel. He reaches up with the arm that isn’t mounted, and pinches Leon’s nipple through his shirt.

“Ah-” Leon whimpers sweetly, hips bucking in haphazard thrusts. “Chris. Chris.”

Chris’ thumb flattens out to circle the hardened point of Leon’s nipple, and so quickly he might have missed it, Leon reaches down and hooks his fingers into the crotch of his own swim shorts, pulling them to the side.

Wet, pulsing skin sits down on the muscles of Chris’ arm, and for the first time ever, Chris gets a look at him.

Wispy, light hairs grow back from a recent shave, and though his cock doesn’t have the sort of girth that Chris’ does, it sits pretty between his legs, plump and protruding, glossy from his own come and swollen like a berry bursting ripely with juice.

Chris watches with a hand on Leon’s tit as Leon drags it back and forth along Chris’ forearm, wetness making the motions slick, his dick disappearing and reappearing as he frots it on Chris’ skin.

All of a sudden, he lets out a panting moan, doubling over. He’s shaky, breath ragged, and with a look of almost-pain in his face, he latches his thighs hard and lifts up his arm, exposing his armpit once again.

“Can you-” he whimpers. “Can you- again- Chris?”

In answer, Chris takes hold of Leon’s arm, turns his head, and licks a long stripe up Leon’s armpit.

“Yes,” he cries weakly, fucking his t-dick along Chris’ outsretched arm. “Oh God.”

Chris swirls his tongue, then sucks, and all at once, Leon collapses on him. A panting, whining, sweaty mess, no longer thrusting as much as he’s needily grinding on Chris’ arm. He lets out a strangled cry, hips fucking in haphazard bucks. Finally, with a ragged groan, Leon falls limply into Chris’ chest, flattening out. Wet and satisfied. All heaving breath and warm clutches.

“Leon,” Chris grunts out, feeling suddenly shy.

“Mmm,” the younger man whines back, squirming all over him. Then he laughs, laughs regaining his composure. “I’m sorry if I was weird.”

“No- you were-”

At the same time, Leon dreamily murmurs, “I feel so…”

He sighs pleasantly, then slumps back down again, turning both of them into a heap of deep breaths and sleepy content.

All of a sudden, from somewhere in the bed, the sheets sing-song out a rhythmic chime.

Chris watches through tired eyes as Leon pushes himself up, looking around. His hands fly automatically to his pockets as he rocks back into a sitting position, confused. When that doesn’t yield anything, he roots around with his hands in the sheets until he finds it, his phone having spilled out of his pocket at some point in the evening.

Chris is still watching as Leon falls over it, mouth still curled into an easy smile, and though Chris can’t see the screen from this angle, he can see the curve of Leon’s shoulders moving as he taps something out.

“Just a sec,” he says distractedly. “I’ll be right back.” Then he rolls onto his side and makes a heaving sound as he careens over the edge of the bed, making for the bathroom with his eyes glued to the screen.

From behind the closed door, the light flickers on, the bathroom air vent whirring to life along with it, and in the sudden solitude, Chris turns to stare up at the ceiling.

He closes his eyes. And waits.

He waits long enough that his stomach starts eating itself, discordant feelings sloshing around in his guts. Leon’s in there long enough that they start to overflow. Those images: Leon bent over the toilet, texting the person he’s in love with. Leon in a group chat, spilling all about what just happened. Leon stifling moans with a hand over his mouth as he jerks off alone, because he didn’t finish and he doesn’t need Chris to get him there.

In the wake of his orgasm, Chris is gripped by a sense of release broader than he could have ever prepared for. If he could still cry, right now he is sure that he’d be gasping for air, left like a fish to flop to death in the sun.

By the time that Leon slinks out of the bathroom, shutting the door gingerly behind him, Chris is shaking and overflowing. He needs to ask, he needs to. No- he doesn’t. It’s all in his head, and he hasn’t ruined anything yet.

But it feels ruined. He’s let it get ruined.

“Sorry,” Leon tells him, grinning shyly. “I just-” Then he stops, a frown furrowing his face. “Are… you okay?” he asks, because of course he can see it.

In the silence, Chris swallows. He tries to nod, but his head doesn’t quite make it.

Too many strikes now. He won’t come back from this one.

“I’m sorry,” Chris says, his heart closing up like a clamshell at the final uttering of those words.

The energy in the room is instantly different. Cold, now. Cold and dark.

If he could just ask. If he could just know.

He’s barely holding himself back, barely prying his own jaws off the impulse to ask Leon for reassurance, but he can’t let himself go there. Because if he gets it, it will feel too good. It will feel too fucking good, and he will keep wanting it and wanting it forever. And that’s not fair.

That’s not a fair thing to do to anybody.

Not even to a man like Wesker.

Leon approaches the bed, crawling up onto the edge slowly. He studies Chris slowly as he settles down onto his legs, phone completely forgotten.

“You know I can’t hear your thoughts,” he says delicately.

Rigidly, Chris manages to look at him. He blinks, shaking his head. “You don’t want to.”

Leon hesitates. “Are they bad?”

“Yeah,” Chris answers.

“Oh… scary.”

“No,” Chris promises quickly. “Nothing scary. Not like that. Sorry.”

“Chris…” Leon says, nervously grating his teeth back and forth. He’s not sure what to say. Because Chris has finally ruined things for good.

“You don’t seem…” he goes on, face twisted nervously. “Emotionally available…?”

Chris blinks. He turns his head to look at Leon dead-on. “Me?” he demands.

A bashful grin splits Leon’s face, and even in the cold of the trickle-down lust of the room, his cheeks are so radiantly pink that they could light up the ocean. “I mean… are you?” he asks. “You keep shutting down and you won’t tell me what’s wrong. I do the tough guy thing too, I think it’s a normal defense mechanism for guys like us, but I… I dunno… I keep trying to chip yours away and it won’t budge. Is this…” He grabs his lip with teeth, like he’s bracing for a blow. “Is this just how you are?”

Chris winces. Maybe, he thinks painedly. Maybe he’s not life’s victim anymore. Maybe now he’s just the asshole.

“I mean,” Leon says again. “Are you even interested in me? Or am I just dragging you into something you aren’t even comfortable with?”

The words land suddenly, muddling Chris’ brain. “What?” he hears himself ask.

“You weren’t sure about kissing me,” Leon parries. “I don’t think you even wanted me to get close. I made you let me drive your car, I’ve just been there, and maybe you feel obligated to not let me down.”

All of a sudden, a different side of Leon is showing itself. It’s more of the man that Chris first met: guarded eyes, a your move posturing, built-up energy seeping from his pores like an angry angel weeping fire.

All at once, Chris can see the combat-ready cop he will make.

“Leon,” Chris hears himself saying.

“Maybe I’m not what you’re looking for,” Leon continues, the words like an iron shield.

“Leon,” Chris insists, a force filling his voice, suddenly determined to beat through the metal. “No. I’m afraid that I’m not good enough.”

Leon’s eyes are narrowed protectively, but at that, his forehead furrows. “What?” he asks, as if it doesn’t make sense to him at all.

“Yes,” Chris growls insistently. “Look at me.” He gestures harshly down at himself. “Then look at you. You’re young and exciting, and you have the entire world ahead of you. I’ve already passed through that phase of my life. I can’t compete.”

“But… who are you competing with?” Leon demands.

He doesn’t know what does it. The gentleness of Leon’s tone. The softening of his abrasive eyes. Or the fact that Chris can’t tell if there’s still hope, or if everything has already been slashed and scorched to the bone.

“I don’t know,” he grunts dickishly. “Whoever was texting you.”

“Whoever-?” Leon looks down at the phone in his hand, and then his eyes bounce right back up. “Oh, no- I wasn’t-”

He huffs out a laugh, dropping the phone into the bed. “I mean, yeah, I texted a few friends back while I was in the bathroom, but. I don’t have anyone like that. My phone went off because I set a reminder to take my T.”

“You don’t…” Chris repeats, shame and relief sinking in his chest, “Have anyone else?”

“No,” Leon laughs. “Jesus. I wouldn’t be pursuing you if I did.”

“But you must have people you’re more interested in than me,” Chris cringes, unable to stop himself. “At least, there must be people who want to be with you.”

“Uh, not really. Not that I know of.” Leon shifts, repositioning on the bed. “Where is this coming from?”

Chris thinks for a moment, mouth clamped hard into a frown. Then he sighs, curling into himself. “I don’t know,” he grumbles. “Just… an assumption.”

On the other side of the conversation, somehow decades apart but only a few inches away, Leon watches Chris wrestle with his thoughts inside an arena he won’t ever see.

Somehow, it changes nothing. It doesn’t impact the way that Leon feels.

Even when Chris gets like this, self-hating and silently tortured, Leon feels so comforted by his presence that he never wants to leave. Big and sturdy- Chris is as strong as a boulder that’s sat in the same spot for dozens of years, and all Leon wants is to lie down on top of the sun-warmed surface of that stone.

Leon sucks in the air, summoning all the bravery he can fortify himself with. “I feel like you’re judging me,” he dares.

Coiled rigidly, Chris gives a pained grimace. For some reason, it makes Leon want to kiss him.

“I’m sorry,” the older man says. “I’m not trying to do that. I think I’m just really out of practice.”

Something swirls in Leon’s chest, making his body go warm. Chris likes him, he realizes. It’s not just a quick fuck for him either. Chris likes him a lot.

And maybe this is his fault. He feels suddenly guilty for trying so hard to sweet talk his way into his bed.

He’d just thought there was no way someone like Chris would ever want him. He’d thought his legs might be open in a way his heart never could mimic.

Guilt trickles through him, coupled by hope, and he wants awfully to fix it so that Chris never shuts down like that again.

“It’s okay to figure it out,” he promises gently, setting a hand down on Chris’ calf. “We just met, and I really, really like you. I still want to get to know you, if… if you do too. I don’t want to stop now.”

When Chris looks up at him, his shielded eyes hopeful, Leon’s heart leaps.

It’s easy to imagine how this will go: Chris, so rooted in his life, will ride the wave of Leon for a little while, but eventually he’ll tire out. He’ll become exasperated by Leon’s energy. Exhausted by his naivety. He’ll move on, closing up, and leave Leon there to yearn for the comfort of those huge, crushing arms.

There’s not much Leon has to offer him in that way. He doesn’t have the same wisdom or the life experience. He doesn’t have the security or the stability that he’s so desperately chasing after. He has a messy childhood, and stumbling feet that’ve walked him into adulthood. No idea of the man he’ll grow into. A shoddy outline of the person he hopes to be.

But maybe he can take his own advice this time. Instead of running away the moment the doubts creep in, maybe he can see how this goes, knowing that neither of them have all the answers yet.

Maybe they can come up with the answers together.

Maybe, if he can look in the mirror and see the Leon he only ever dreamed would one day be gazing back at him, he can believe, somehow, that there’s a version of him in the future that’s watching over him right now.

When Leon returns to Chris’ hotel room twenty minutes later, Chris has hung out his swimsuit to dry over the shower, his trunks replaced by a pair of flannel pants that hug his hips and tie cutely at his waist. The roll of his hairy stomach makes Leon’s hunger tumble to life all over again, a feral, aching desire to eat every inch of masculinity that he exudes pounding deep in Leon’s throat.

Dressed in his own fresh t-shirt and pajama bottoms, Leon closes the door behind him, smiling shyly at the way that Chris sits up on the bed, examining him with professionally trained eyes.

“So…” Leon says, gripping the tube in nervous hands, “I still have to do my T, but I was just waiting to dry off before putting it on, and I didn’t… wanna wait any longer to see you.”

Chris nods, and though Leon can’t read the look on his face anymore than he’s ever been able to, this time, he makes sure to not assume the worst.

“You do the gel?” Chris asks.

Leon nods, a compulsive grin splitting across his face. “Yeah. I bet you- what? Used to jam a dozen syringes into your back and walk around the house like that?”

He’s not sure by Chris’ stoic reaction if the joke lands, but he thinks he sees something twitch in the corner of Chris’ eyes.

“Well-” he starts, but Leon laughs.

“I’m kidding, Chris. I’ll be right back, I’m just gonna go put this on.”

“I-” Chris starts and stops, looking sheepish. “I can do it for you,” he offers quietly.

“Oh, I’m not supposed to let anyone touch…” he trails off, watching Chris’ eyes narrow in amusement. “Right,” he says.

Chris laughs gruffly. “Yeah,” he answers, smiling a little, so that Leon’s heart kicks up in his chest. “Come here.”

Slowly, pulling his shirt over his head as he goes, Leon walks towards the bed. Chris greets him right at the edge.

Pulse still butterflying, he lets Chris take the tube into his hands and crawls up beside him, waiting patiently as Chris squeezes a glob of t-gel into his palms and then starts to rub them together, warming it up.

“A pump on each arm,” he instructs quietly, staring up at the older man with a kind of deferential trust that makes his whole body feel fuzzy.

Chris nods. He rolls the gel between his palms a few more times before he reaches out and takes hold of Leon’s shoulder, carefully spreading it over the curve of his collars and down the flat of his arm.

“Thank you,” Leon murmurs, the contact so intimate that he can’t help but imagine Chris siphoning out his own chemicals and sharing them with him. The shameless part of him wishes that he could tip back, and let Chris spit them onto his tongue.

He would let him.

There’s a lot, he realizes dizzyingly, that he never realized he wanted to let someone else do to him. There’s a lot that will imprint on him, that he’ll remember forever, even when this hotel is torn to the ground. Even when the RPD itself is dust.

“There…” Chris murmurs lowly, spreading another slab across his palms and then working the gel into Leon’s other arm. “How’s that?”

Leon’s face heats with shyness. He looks down, trying to hide his smile. “It’s perfect,” he answers.

Chris’ rough palm slides up his naked back, then wraps around the back of his neck. As Chris pulls him in for a kiss, his wet hands smear the t-gel everywhere.

He’s supposed to give it enough time to dry. He’s supposed to keep himself away from others. Instead, Leon leans in, letting it get all over Chris’ chest. He feels it glide from his skin to Chris’ as their mouths meet, somehow still as hungry as the first time they kissed, even when their motions are spent, and slow.

He feels the slippery wetness all over his chest, and in between them.

He tastes it on his lips when they kiss.

Chris hammers out a report on his keyboard, the words so routine that they nearly materialize all on their own.

Half of his brain sits in the swivel chair tucked into his cubicle, running on autopilot and keenly aware of Barry dribbling a bouncy ball up and down on his desk. The other half scours over menus in his mind, hunting down the perfect place for lunch.

The salty, chlorinated air that’d clung to his hair for days has almost fully aired out. Now, fumes from car exhaust pipes and steam from the sewer grates mark his skin again, the leaves of Racoon City’s trees clinging to his clothes, the wooden-tobacco scent of the inside of his creaky apartment.

He’s tired, and bored, but something still sparks at the back of his head. An excitement about what he’s going to eat today. A thrill at the notion of clocking out at the end of his shift.

A glimpse of Leon in his police uniform, so soft and pretty that he can turn a garish navy into the gentlest baby blue.

Not just a glimpse- a full appearance. Barry’s idle fidgeting gets itself together as soon as their newest rookie enters into the room.

“Hey, Leon,” Jill smiles up at him, her face a delighted display of grinning cheeks.

“Hey Leon,” Barry parrots. Unlike Jill, however, he doesn’t flash Chris a knowing look as if to remind him, Just so you know, I always know what’s going on in this office.

“Hi,” Leon greets them shyly, his eyes pointed straight at Chris.

He sits up in his chair, straightening out, and watches as Leon approaches his desk.

“So…”

Leon tucks the radio hooked to his belt out of the way as he lowers his voice, smiling boyishly as though he wants Chris’ pulse to race out of his work uniform.

“Vegan food?” Leon asks.

Chris laughs, the tension popping in his chest. Then he growls. “Fuck no,” he says.

Leon narrows his eyes, smiling slyly. “Vegetarian,” he challenges.

“Mozzarella sticks are inarguably vegetarian,” Chris reasons, scanning the report one last time before sending it through. He sighs and then minimizes the screen, rolling away from the monitor. “I guess I shouldn’t be upset that domestic terrorism has been slow these past few years. But God do I miss getting out there.”

“We could swap,” Leon suggests easily, shrugging.

Chris’ eyes flicker over the top of his cubicle and he lowers his voice, more as a silent ask for his teammates’ tact than anything. “That would be one way to get you onto STARS.”

Leon smiles, his eyes shifting away.

Chris leans back, searching the younger man’s expression. “What?” he asks.

“No, nothing,” Leon quickly returns, grinning sheepishly. “That would be one way to do it, yeah.”

Chris’ eyes narrow. “Okay…” he grunts, though he doesn’t press it.

And Leon is glad he doesn’t. Because even with no shame to fall back on anymore, he could never admit to Chris that he’s not really interested in STARS. That he was never studying them because he wanted on the team.

In truth, he’d been studying the team because he wanted to get close to the man who’d caught his attention. He'd wanted to catch him back. Hook him. It had been an urgent, pressing desire, like he just needed to seize the opportunity to get Chris in his hands, and then he could worry about the rest of the details later.

But he might have gotten a little obsessed in the process. And Leon might have quickly realized that later always comes much sooner than expected.

But he can’t confess that. He can’t tell Chris how often he ran it through his mind, all those ways he might be able to get close to him, to get the man he idolized to glance his way. Not now, at least. So he just leans back, letting his smile blow the conversation away, and settles casually against Chris’ desk.

In Chris’ mind, that fantasy still lingers: the shoddy outline of an imagined Leon still sits on his desk, dangling his feet. Grinning and laughing and emblazoned with the STARS badge, haunting his imagination like a ghost that won’t let go.

When he needs comfort, Chris still clings to that image of Leon at night. He still makes himself sick suckling on the ghost of Leon that he’d created in his head.

Chris isn’t sure why it feels like relief when the two of them don’t overlap.

Leon leans against his work station while his fantasy of Leon kicks it feet from the desk’s edge, the way he first imagined it at the hotel.

Leon could hoist himself up and sit right down into it, merging the two completely. But he doesn’t.

And somehow, Chris likes this version of him better.