Chapter Text
Leon S. Kennedy wanted it on record that he fucking hated being cold.
Give him a half-dozen BOWs and a jammed six-shooter over trudging through snow and ice and his own fogged-up breath any day of the week. It didn’t matter how many layers he wore under his coat (bulletproof or otherwise), he still had to grind his molars together so they didn’t chatter. He’d been picking his way down a slope for what felt like forever, and the tension in his neck and shoulders was no joke. His face hurt, his eyes stung, and his hands felt stuck to his gun despite the layer of protection offered by his gloves. A quick check of the clock in his head paired with a glance at the moon told him he’d been walking for almost three hours now, and he hadn’t run into anything–human, infected, or otherwise.
Something was following him, though.
Leon had to give whatever it was credit: it had the ability to make very little noise and stop on a dime. Every time he swung around to aim his weapon in between the bases of tall pines trees, there was nothing for him to see. Once in a great while he heard it–a huffed breath, a twig snapping–but for the most part, it seemed content to go wherever he was going. He needed to deal with it, he knew that… but for some reason, his natural defense mechanisms weren’t kicking in.
“Why did it have to be fucking Austria in fucking February?” Leon grumbled to himself, stepping over a fallen tree. At first, it looked like it might’ve collapsed due to wind, but then he noticed the large gouges near its base, like something had clawed it out of the dirt. “Fantastic. When I find you, Redfield, I’m going to shoot you.”
If he’s not already dead , a traitorous voice in Leon’s head whispered, but he stomped it out as quickly as it arrived.
Chris was alive.
Or at least he had been roughly eighteen hours ago, when Leon got his marching orders to come and find the BSAA’s golden boy and his squad. From what he’d been told, it sounded like a seek-and-destroy gone wrong; apparently, Chris was worried after the events in that remote village in Romania that the Cadou could have potentially broken containment long before Ethan Winters was able to destroy Mother Miranda. Big bad Agent Redfield had taken his squad to an area a few hundred miles over the border in Austria that had some evidence of a lycan problem, and then they just… disappeared. Fell off the map, but not before one last message got sent through the secure network from Chris’s phone: SEND KENNEDY .
That had initiated panic over at the BSAA, and Leon–who had a reputation in their line of work for finding the unfindable even when he wasn’t name-dropped–got roped in. Well… to be more accurate, he’d already gotten several texts and one worried call from Claire regarding Chris’s disappearance, and when the BSAA had reached out to him, Leon hadn't hesitated to hop on a plane. Whether he liked it or not, he owed Redfield for getting him out of his own head when all he’d wanted to do was get drunk enough to find the courage to eat a bullet. Plus, they were friends… as much as Leon could be friends with someone he found painfully attractive who was also so far out of his league it was laughable and definitely straight, anyway.
Back to the matter at hand: he was fucking cold, there was something following him, and according to the GPS pinging on his phone, he was still a considerable distance from Chris’s last known position. The ground was beginning to even out, indicating that Leon was coming down from the flat-topped mountain where a helicopter had dropped him off, but that was a double-edged sword; the closer he got to the village, the more likely it was that he would run into some undesirable company.
As if summoned by Leon’s thoughts alone, there was movement in the clearing ahead of him. He stopped dead and slipped behind the nearest tree, sucking in a breath and holding it so he could strain his ears. It sounded like two… no, three sets of feet plodding around in the snow, sniffing and scratching in a way that made adrenaline burn down his spine. He hadn’t faced down lycans yet himself, of course, but from what he understood they were more intelligent than the average zombie. They were also faster and stronger, which all translated to harder to kill .
Once he knew what was waiting ahead of him, Leon’s gaze flicked to the path he’d just made–and he froze when he locked eyes with something watching him from the darkness. As he watched, it moved, those brown eyes shot through with amber rising until they were well above head height, and it took Leon a shameful number of seconds to realize the change indicated that the thing had gone from sitting to standing. Whatever it was, it was huge , and as it lumbered toward him, the creatures in the clearing fell silent.
There were no good choices here. If Leon shot the massive creature that was approaching him, there was no guarantee it would do anything more than it piss it off–plus, he’d be giving away his location to what he presumed was a group of lycans. But by the same token, the lycans seemed to be afraid of whatever this huge thing was, so maybe he could fire off a few rounds and use the ensuing chaos as cover, but its eyes –its eyes looked human , and that couldn’t be right, no human shook the snow from trees as its shoulders bumped into them.
And yet…
With a quick glance toward the clearing, Leon stared into those disturbingly familiar eyes again–growing ever closer, attached to a furry body that had to be at least seven feet tall when walking on two feet–and came to a realization that left him feeling equal parts shocked and indignant. “ Chris ?” he hissed out, lowering the gun when the creature ducked its head and whined quietly. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?”
Another whine, and there were paws–no, they were more like hands, albeit the size of tennis rackets–on Leon’s shoulders, hot like brands through his clothes and body armor. Before Leon could react to that, there was something wet and slightly rough dragging over his cheek.
He was being licked .
Chris was licking him.
“Ugh,” Leon mumbled intelligently, pushing lightly at Chris’s muzzle. He used the back of the same hand to wipe the slobber off his cheek. “You know, whenever I pictured your tongue on my body, I gotta say this wasn’t how I saw it.” He glanced over to the clearing again and relaxed marginally when he saw that the lycans were gone. “Looks like you managed to scare them off without doing much.” He holstered his gun and rubbed his face, peering into those too-intelligent eyes. They were set into a gigantic head, one that was mostly like a wolf’s, and now that Chris was close enough Leon could see that his fur was essentially the same color as his hair–dark brown with touches of gray. “Huh. So… you forget your razor at home?”
Warm breath huffed against his forehead in something like a chuckle. The hands were still a scorching weight on Leon’s shoulders, and he was very aware of the lethal-looking claws on the ends of each finger. They were caked with blood, and when Leon looked closer he saw blood on Chris’s muzzle too, along with what looked like a nasty bite wound on the place where his neck met his shoulder.
“Shit,” Leon murmured, brushing a thumb near the edge of the scabbed-over teeth marks without conscious thought. In fact, the majority of his conscious thought had gone out the fucking window, because Chris was alive but he was a goddamn werewolf , and unless the rules of the world had changed (again) when Leon wasn’t looking, that meant he was also an infected. One dangerous enough to be classed as a BOW, for sure… but the idea of Chris hurting him didn’t enter Leon’s mind. “What the hell happened there?” he asked, tipping his head in the general direction of the village. “Is this Romania all over again?”
Another huff from Chris, this one more like annoyance–probably at the fact that he couldn’t talk, Leon realized belatedly. He opened his mouth to say something else but kept silent when Chris tensed, hearing the sound that made him go rigid a second later: snuffling and snarling, the signature sounds of lycans… only this time there weren’t just three but at least a dozen, yellow eyes flashing and muscles rippling.
Leon grasped the shotgun on his back and pulled away from Chris to get a better angle on the approaching enemies. He missed the furnace-like warmth of the beast as soon as he stepped aside, but he couldn’t help but smile when he heard the growl Chris let out. It was strangely close to the noise the human version of his friend would make right before they got down to killing zombies. He glanced over at Chris and allowed the smile to turn into a grin. “On me?”
Chris dropped to all fours.
Leon racked a shell.
The lycans attacked.
~***~
In addition to being cold, Leon officially hated fighting lycans.
He came to this conclusion as he watched his own blood stain the snow beneath him, body sprawled on the ground like a hastily discarded toy. His shotgun was… somewhere, lost when one of the lycans hit him with a fucking tree branch , of all things. This was a scenario with which he was intimately familiar, and the fact that his bulletproof vest had been shredded away from his torso was bad, but the gouges raked down his side were much worse. They pulsed his life away as he watched, and he had a first aid spray somewhere but he couldn’t make his hands move to find it.
It took blackness creeping into the edges of Leon’s vision for him to realize he didn’t want to die. Not like this, anyway, and not in front of Chris, even if it was debatable whether he’d remember it once he turned human again ( if he turned human again). So Leon tried harder to move, to fight, but all that did was send a pulse of agony through his body so strong he almost puked. Absently he noticed that the sounds of bones breaking and pained screeching around him had ceased–and then all at once he was being lifted into the air.
“Jesus fuck,” Leon wheezed, the pain like a living thing crawling around inside him–and he knew precisely how that felt. He was being cradled against a warm, furry chest, and once his brain figured out it was Chris carrying him somewhere, it decided to turn off. “Don’t… lick me again,” he mumbled, and promptly passed out.
~***~
Consciousness returned to Leon in pieces.
He got back his sense of feeling first, which was both good and bad. Good because he could tell he still had all his parts attached, bad because the wound to his side burned like a bitch. He could tell immediately that it had been dressed and treated with herbs, their familiar tingling as they worked their magic almost a comfort. Smell came next, carrying a tinge of woodsmoke melded with musty wool and… wet dog?
Oh, right. Chris was a werewolf.
That thought slammed into Leon’s head like a sledgehammer and made him sit up as he opened his eyes, the world teetering on its axis around him. He glimpsed what appeared to be the interior of some kind of cabin before he had to squeeze them shut again, fighting back a sudden wave of nausea.
“Hey, take it easy,” a voice said, and tension bled from Leon’s body. That was Chris’s voice, hoarse with disuse but immediately recognizable all the same. “You gonna puke?”
“Jury’s still out on that.” Leon groaned quietly and held his head in his hands, just now figuring out that he probably got a concussion to go with his claw marks when he hit the ground. Delightful. “I can’t look yet–are you still a furball?”
“No, I’m not.” Chris’s tone was… off. He sounded almost… sad, which couldn’t be right. “Leon, I… I’m so sorry.”
Swallowing back a mouthful of bile, Leon finally tried raising his head again, albeit much slower this time. He was, in fact, inside a cabin–actually, less like a cabin and more like a chalet, from the looks of things. He’d been lying in the middle of a king-sized bed, naked from the waist up, with thick but slightly dusty blankets now pooled around his waist. The only light in the bedroom came from the crackling fireplace and a small oil lamp on the nightstand.
Carefully, Leon turned his head enough to find Chris. He was slumped in a wingback chair in the furthest corner of the room near the door, clothed in a bathrobe that didn’t leave a ton to the imagination. That might’ve been distracting were it not for the look on Chris’s handsome face, like a man crushed by sorrow as he faced down an executioner. Those arresting eyes were fixed on Leon, endless pools of sadness and regret tinged with an unnatural amber glow.
“What are you–” The question died in Leon’s throat when he noticed his shotgun resting across the foot of the bed. It was in pristine condition, like it’d never left his hands during the fight with the lycans. A box of shells sat next to it, open and gleaming. “Chris… what is this?”
Oh, that’s what Chris looked like when he was on the verge of tears. “You already know.” He tried to muster up a smile and failed miserably, gesturing toward the weapon. “You know , Leon. You have to put me down.”