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Hiding it from Chris is a non-option.
They’ve known each other longer than they haven’t; Leon owes him honesty, if not for himself then for Claire.
The house they share is small, and under neither of their names. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a sprawling backyard and a daylight basement full of gym equipment.
They’d built it from the ground up; an empty lot in the middle of nowhere, Kentucky. Acres of land with no neighbors and no main roads, speckled with weeping willows, interspersed with natural creeks and ponds that overflow when it rains. It’s perfect in an imperfect sort of way; neither of them are particularly fond of the humid heat that sticks to the summer months, and winter always freezes the water pipes. Hail storms have broken windows, and heavy rainfall once flooded the sunroom where Leon likes to sit and read and Chris likes to sit and watch him. They’ve torn the place apart, broken it down to bare bones and built it back up time and time again; poured blood, sweat and tears into the foundations and have come out with something to call home. Something to call theirs.
Theirs, and no one else’s.
It’s a novel feeling, having a house to call home and a person to call his.
Leon is in the basement when Chris finds him.
The slider is thrown open to let in the spring breeze, and Leon is pummeling the punching bag hanging from the ceiling. He doesn’t know how long he’s been down here, but the bag is shiny and slick with blood.
The test results sit innocently on the lifting bench: T-Virus infection. Stage one.
“I think it’s dead, Leon,” Chris says, light and teasing, and Leon jolts, coming back to his body all at once.
His chest is heaving, lungs tight and desperate for air. His entire body aches, overworked and overexerted, and his head throbs in time with the frantic beat of his heart. He’s been clenching his teeth, he thinks. His knuckles are a fucking mess; skin split tender over bone, bloody and swollen and already bruising. He doesn’t think anything’s broken, but he can’t actually feel his hands anymore.
“Chris?” Leon asks hoarsely. His hands curl loosely on either side of the bag, holding it steady as he drops his forehead against it and breathes.
He can feel the shift behind him, amusement to worry like a switch flipping. He hears Chris’s heavy footfalls, the sound of the mini fridge opening and closing. A large, warm hand flattens against the naked skin at the small of his back and slides up to settle between his shoulder blades, heedless of his sweat slicked skin.
An opened bottle of water is knocked gently against the knob of his wrist and he unclenches his fingers to grab it, sinking back against Chris’s chest.
Chris accommodates him easily, holding his weight and sliding his arms around Leon’s waist, fingers splaying wide on the flat of his belly, fingertips tucked into the waistband of Leon’s sweatpants. It’s not sexual, just closeness for the sake of closeness, and Leon feels the last of the tension and rage tremble out of him, leaving him hollowed out and cracked open, lax against Chris’s body.
Chris holds him while he drinks, steadies the bottle when it shakes, and doesn’t say anything at all until he’s guided Leon through slow sips until the bottle is empty, plastic crackling in his grip.
“Talk to me, baby,” Chris murmurs in his ear, nuzzling his nose against Leon’s temple. It’s gross, probably, the pair of them all but glued together with sweat, but Chris is unbothered, lips tucked against the shell of Leon’s ear. “What’s going on?”
Leon’s eyes slide tiredly to the right, gaze settling on the stupid piece of paper that’s sealed his fate. He exhales slowly, eyes slipping closed as defeat washes through him like a tidal wave, devastating, all consuming.
“We need to talk.”
It goes better than Leon thought it would.
Or, at the very least, it isn’t as bad as it could’ve been.
Deny deny deny, that’s what Chris had done, horror and hurt raising his voice higher and higher until the guilt over yelling had stopped him cold, shut him down completely.
Leon’s legs stop holding his weight sometime around the third desperate call, Chris’s fingers bloodless and trembling around the test results, Captain Redfield snapping demands and pleas into the phone tucked against his ear.
Leon sinks onto the bench and props his elbows on his knees, head in his hands while Chris makes phone call after phone call after phone call. Every fucking contact he has until it’s just him and Leon and the widening chasm between them; no answers, no cures, no miracles.
“I’m sorry,” Leon says into the heavy silence.
“What?” Chris asks dazedly, and then snaps back to himself all at once. “What?” he repeats, harsher, voice gone sharp with shock.
One, two, three steps to close the distance between them and then Chris is sinking to his knees, one of the joints clicking and creaking and it’s almost enough for Leon to shake off the numbness, to shove at Chris’s shoulders and fall back into some semblance of self but—
He can’t.
He fucking can’t.
So he lets Chris kneel at his feet and doesn’t fret over his bad knee. He doesn’t drag Chris upright or laughingly pull him into a kiss or smile fondly against his mouth. He doesn’t say “stop it, you idiot, you’ll hurt yourself,” and Chris doesn’t pout and say back “but baby, it’s my favorite place to be!”
Because that’s something they would’ve done yesterday, when he was alive and whole and healthy, when the tickle in his throat and the tightness in his chest was just a cold, when they were happy and he wasn’t fucking dying.
“I don’t know what to do,” Leon admits quietly, dropping his forehead against Chris’s. “I don’t—fuck, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.”
“You can stop apologizing, for one,” Chris says. “This isn’t your fault.”
“It’s not just me, Chris, you know that—”
“I can’t think about that right now,” Chris says tightly. Leon can hear the waver in his voice, the tremble beneath his words that precedes the breaking. Leon doesn’t push. He doesn’t need to tell Chris exactly how much he’s going to lose.
“I’m so—”
“I swear to god, Leon—”
Leon laughs, a tired breath of a thing, and Chris catches it in his mouth, slotting their lips together and tangling his fingers desperately in Leon’s hair.
“We’ve still got time,” Chris says. “We have time, Leon. We’re gonna figure this out.”
Chris’s hope is an infectious thing; Leon can feel it start to take root in the depths of his chest like a stubborn weed sprouting between the cracks in the sidewalk.
“I can’t believe I married an optimist,” Leon grumbles, and Chris laughs wetly, pressing their foreheads together more firmly.
“One of us has to be.”
They breathe together, quiet, tumultuous, until it feels a little less like the earth is going to shake apart.
Chris shifts, knees to toes to heels and then further still, sitting on the floor and stretching his legs out so he can draw Leon down on top of him. Leon goes easy, one of Chris’s hands at his nape and the other spanning the small of his back, guiding him into Chris’s lap, knees splayed on either side of Chris’s hips. Chris leans on his palms, tips his head back to stare up at Leon, eyes bright and shining with the type of complete, wholehearted devotion only Chris Redfield possesses.
“We will figure this out,” he repeats, always so goddamn sure, and Leon kisses him again; a little helpless, a little hopeless, a little desperate. Utterly terrified and still so achingly grateful for the man he married over a decade ago, who put a ring on his finger and promised to love him for the rest of their lives; who’s made Leon feel the weight and reality of that promise every fucking day since.
“I love you,” Leon says quietly, words pressed into Chris’s mouth, breathed into his lungs, held safe and held steady.
“I love you too, baby,” Chris murmurs, nosing along the ridge of Leon’s cheekbone, tucking his lips into the curve of his temple. “You trust me?”
“Always,” Leon answers immediately, unflinching and unhesitant. There aren’t very many people he can say that to and mean it.
“Then trust me now. I’m not letting you go, baby. We’ll figure this out because anything else is a non-option.”
“Not sure if you can punch your way through this one, tough guy,” Leon teases lightly, breathlessly. Chris’s hope is infectious and Leon lets it wrap around him like a soft blanket, familiar and unwavering.
“I told you that in confidence,” Chris mutters petulantly, but his mouth, still warm against Leon’s skin, is smiling.
“It’s no boulder,” Leon says, smothering a smile. “But maybe if you try really hard—”
“Okay, that’s it—” Chris rolls, pinning Leon beneath the bulk of his body, and Leon hitches his thighs around Chris’s hips and laughs.