SAVEGUARD ⟼ leon s. kennedy

xxvi. vulnerable thoughts

𝟜𝕡𝕞
𝕔𝕝𝕖𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕖

Leon and I are sitting on the floor with our backs leaning against the wall, still waiting for Chris and Jill. My head is on his shoulder and he's fidgeting with his handgun, sliding the magazine open again and again, clicking the safety on and off.

"Is that safe?" I ask him.

"If I'm the one doing it, sure," he says quietly.

"Cocky much?" I laugh.

"You'd be too if you went through the training I did." His voice drops a couple of octaves, and I can tell it's not a topic he enjoys talking about.

"Six years, right?"

He nods. "Almost broke me."

"But look at you now. A complete pro," I say, poking him in the arm.

"I wouldn't say I'm a pro," he says. "Sometimes I still react to things like how I used to when I was twenty-one, on my first day in Raccoon City."

I sit up and lean forward, to look at him better. "That's good though, no? That you still have a part of you left over."

He shrugs slowly. "I guess."

"Do you miss the person you were? Before all of this shit happened?"

I see his eyes glaze over for a few seconds, like he's stuck in a trance. "Definitely," he says finally. "Why? Do you think it'll happen to you too?"

I look forward, looking at the deck, with the ruins of the fight we had with that infected thing that had attacked us from the pool. Its body is still there, half submerged in the dirty bloodied water. Vapour is coming out of it, like it's being cooked in the sun's light. "I think it already has," I admit.

Leon nudges me until I look at him. "You'll find ways to cope, you know. Otherwise you'll go crazy thinking about it."

I look away, because the sincere look on his face makes my heart break a little. "Yeah? How do you cope with it?"

He exhales like he's about to start laughing, but he stops. "Flirting with cute cops like you."

"Oh?" I chuckle. "I'm just a coping mechanism to you?"

"You definitely... help." He shrugs again. "Alcohol helps too. For a while, anyway."

"Great. So my options are either to become an alcoholic or let you use me to get over your own trauma," I say, biting the inside of my cheek. I mean it as a joke, but it sounds like those are the only outcomes from this situation we found ourselves in.

"Or you can... You know, use me too, to— to get over your own problems," he adds, and leans his head back against the wall, and pulls me by the arm, until our heads are touching, both resting against the wall.

"It'd be ridiculously easy to take advantage of you like that," I say through a smile.

"What makes you think that?" He asks, and turns around to look at me. I can feel his eyes studying my face, and I give him a quick look, returning the eye contact. He has a few wisps of blonde hair covering his eyes, and he shakes them out of the way innocently, smiling a little as our eyes meet.

"Look at you, you look too innocent sometimes." I ruffle his hair, and he grabs my hand by my wrist, stopping me.

"Innocent?" He asks, gripping my wrist.

"Just the vibe you give off," I say, pulling my hand away.

His grip tightens around my wrist. "One of us is a rookie, and it isn't me, Clementine," he says, smiling a little deviously.