sweeterthanficstion

[sweeterthanficstion]

— almost spring || l.s.k

pairing: slasher(?)!leon kennedy x fem!reader

tags: set in 1974, DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT!! graphic depictions murder, suicide, death, and animal death. leon has a god complex (? that was an accident), themes of religious guilt, religious trauma/conflict, and references to parental abuse. heavy depictions of grief, themes of obsession and other typical horror topics. if i've missed anything, as always, please let me know!!

summary: Leon loves you too much to let you leave, but not enough to let you live. Or: In 1974, you fall in love with a boy. A boy who loves too hard and too viciously, and on the eve of your departure for college, realises he doesn't quite know how to live without you. Leon takes you to the old homestead where his grief has festered, under the pretense of one last memory together. What you don’t know is he’s spent weeks convincing himself that if he can’t have you forever, no one else should.

word count: 15.1k (IT GOT LONGER)

a/n: hi so firstly if you saw me upload this 2 days ago and take it down within five hours 1) no you didnt, and 2) i'm sorry 😭 i was really unhappy with the finished version of the fic at the time, it wasn't edited at the time and i love this piece too much to put it out into the world like that. AND HONESTLY! i wasn't even going to post it in the first place because (ik i promised you all more rockstar!leon but when have i ever stuck to my promises) i felt it was too self-indulgent for anyone else to enjoy anyway, but i have a few very good friends that convinced me otherwise. so. here we are.

i hope some of you like this, and if it's not your jam then i get it, please don't read it if any of those tags make you uneasy or feel obligated to just because i've posted it and you follow this blog. anyway, i hope the those of you that do fw this enjoy it :) slasher!leon is my baby, i love him dearly, i hope i did him justice and you love this fic as much as i do.

playlist ⭑ AO3 || back to the party ⭑ « future⭑ present ⭑ past (coming soon) »

There is something so very wrong with this town.

You’ve known it for much too long; there is a staleness to the air and a stagnation to the people. Nothing ever changes, and yet nothing has ever felt the same. There is no comfort in familiarity here, past the tree line and in the prairie — the whistle of the wind does not soothe, nor do the roads ever lead home.

Soon, the prairie will settle into its stiffness as it always does. Even in summer, this ghost town remains cold and lifeless, a carcass of a place that you're not sure was ever alive to begin with. Yet where it’d usually bother you, you don’t find you mind so much this year, because by spring you’ll be gone.

Away from here and into the city; you will go to university, you will study, you will make so much money you will never have to worry about money again. You will leave this lonely prairie town behind, and you won't stop until you’ve driven a thousand miles and a mile and have reached the end of the world. Then, you think, you will be happy.

But for now you endure the biting cold and the terrible people, finish up your final semester of school, and wonder endlessly what the city must be like. You know it bustles with a life you yearn to love. Maybe you will find a home in an apartment on a busy street above a record store, suffocated between two more buildings, so cramped yet you do not mind because the air is thick with life and opportunity. You will crack open your bedroom window each morning and climb onto the fire escape. There, you will let the warmth of a morning coffee seep through ceramic and into your cold hands and you will smile as the sun rises to greet you.

You can’t wait, you count the days until summer on your fingers. You never did like autumn or winter anyway—not when this town already feels like shades of blue all year round.

The stupor you’ve let yourself fall into is shattered when there come two knocks at your window. 

Leon walks into your life time and time again as if on stage cue, as if he’s practised being in your life infinitesimally. Through your window, he stumbles in like Romeo, a smile on his face and an autumn night's blush on his cheeks.

“God, Leon, you scared me,” you huff, the cold draft he lets in makes gooseflesh dot across your arms, makes you pout. You’re not really upset, but you feel like you should be. You’ve told him a hundred times over that he shouldn’t visit you unprompted through your window at ungodly hours of the night, lest your mother find out.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Leon placates you with a kiss to your temple, and then one to the corner of your mouth that tugs a reluctant smile from you.

He isn’t really sorry—no, not when it means he can kiss you like this. He thinks all the chiding he gets from you is worth it as long as his lips stay on yours.

Leon never did anticipate falling in love. It wasn’t a part of his plan. Then again, he never really had one. After the death of his parents, the world had dulled to something akin to a bitter grey, and he’d begun to see his life through a screen of black and white.

That was until you. You, sweet as summer rain and spring sunshine. You, with a heart that beats as loud as his. You came into his life and suddenly the world seemed brighter even despite the noose this prairie town hung around his neck.

Leon, who hasn’t believed in anything since he was twelve, kneeling in church pews, now finds that the only thing he believes in is the way your mouth shapes his name.

You give him hope—and that terrifies him. Hope is bright, and it burns his wrists like stigmata every time he reaches out for it. You are dangerous, in the way that only someone who makes him want can be. You make him want things he has no business wanting, things he never allowed himself to need.

Your hands are a vice that hold a power over him that you don’t even know of. But if Leon is to suffer under anyone's hand, he thinks, it might as well be yours.

You tap his chest once, twice, thrice. Pull him back to the now with such softness it chokes him. He worries he might crush you under his hold.

“Why’d you sneak through the window?” You ask suddenly, question catching him off guard, but the gentleness to your voice keeps him at ease.

“Well, I missed you.” Leon explains easily.

“I have a phone you can call me on, you know.”

“Yes. But I like seeing you.” He leaves unsaid the truth that drives him; he wants to ensure you’re real. Flesh and blood and tangible under his fingertips.

Because as of late, nothing feels real anymore.

Leon thinks the homestead must finally be getting to him. No, he doesn’t live there—thank God. But he goes there once a week for a reason he can’t explain anymore. At first, it was because the place was quiet, somewhere to quell the noise of his head for a few hours, and in his half-hearted hubris, he stayed. But now he’s convinced the darkness in those hallways has crept into his mind. Like a fish on a line, he is hopelessly tethered there.

The homestead—like an accumulation of past horrors that have nowhere left to go—must feed on sadness, as all evil things do. The house breathes in his despair as if it is a living being, twists his thoughts until the line between his own mind and the evil that lurks there blurs. He wonders if perhaps it chose him—if it knows his heart better than he does, if it sees the rot taking root deep inside.

But then there you are again, his sweet summer rain, his spring sunshine. He forgets about the cold in the heat of your embrace. You are a stagnation he is grateful for, an anchor, his temporary reprieve from the vigour that is his mind. The world will come and go, he knows, this town won’t change, but that’s fine—he will memorise the cadence of your heartbeat beneath your skin, and when that is not enough he will kiss you as he craves you and love you until there is nothing left of himself to give.

He knows he should tell you this, knows he should, but then you look at him—a gaze as soft as warm candlelight in the dark, and reach for him, like you don’t know what he’s capable of.

"You’re quiet," you say, fingers brushing his wrist, curling there like an anchor, like you could tether him to you instead.

"Just thinking," he murmurs, shaking his head.

You sigh, shifting back on the bed, patting the space beside you. Stay. You don’t say it aloud, but he hears it all the same.

Leon hesitates. Just for a moment. Then, with an exhale, he climbs in next to you.

You fit against him like you were made to be, your head tucked perfectly under his chin, one arm slung lithely across his waist. He is a furnace against you, all heat and warmth, and although he snuck in from the cold, it seems like his heart has been radiating warmth all along.

Leon wonders if it’s because of you.

Now, he counts your breaths, feels them feather out against his throat, the soft rise and fall of your chest against his ribs. 

And when you shift to look at him, your chin lifting ever so, his heart stumbles. Your fingers reach up, tracing the sharp edge of his jaw, then trailing lower, down the line of his throat, pressing softly against his pulse.

He knows you feel it, the boyish way it races.

You hum, closing your eyes again, pressing close, smiling sleepily against his skin.

Leon watches you for a long time after that.

He tells himself he will let you go once you’ve fallen asleep. He will climb back out your window and let the dusk swallow him up in its slow fade from ink to indigo.

But yet you are warm against him, your heart a steady lull, alive and breathing. 

So instead, he stays. 

The wind ripples through the prairie grass like it might be alive, shushing against itself as it bends and sways. The damp earth gives softly under Leon’s boots as he tracks his own footsteps down the path he knows so well.

He moves without thinking, without deciding, the path is muscle memory to him. He ducks beneath the broken split-rail fence, fingers grazing its surface. Years of sun and wandering hands have worn it down, soft weather-worn wood that no longer splinters. 

The old house sits in the distance like a bad omen, its roof sagging in, paint peeling under years of heat and snow and rain. Its windows are like hollow eyes, watching, watching, watching. Always watching.

It is empty here, it has been empty for a long time.

The trap is set just beyond the homestead around the back, nestled deep into the brush. Leon checks it the way he always does, though he’s still not sure why. There is no need for him to do so anymore, no one is waiting for him to bring something home. No one will scold him for forgetting, or praise him for getting it right.

Maybe, he thinks, he set it to see if he could.

Maybe just to see if something would stumble into it, to see if the universe would put something small and helpless in his hands.

Maybe so he could prove to himself that he wouldn’t do it despite himself. 

His father’s voice still haunts the edges of his memory, changed and softened by time, and the longing for a love greater than he was given. A summer afternoon, tall grass brushing his baby-soft calves. A gentle hand, with years of experience etched into the calluses, guiding his own. 

See? His father’s voice echoes. Like this. It’s quick. They won’t feel a thing. A clean kill is a kind kill.

Leon doesn’t remember if he believed that.

So still, he isn’t sure why he returns each day to check the trap, but he does it anyway, yesterday it was empty, and the day before that too. He had exhaled relief both times. 

Yet today—

The rabbit is trembling.

It is small and wild, barely more than a handful in size, yet shaking and thrashing with the force of something twice its size. It’s all matted fur and wide, scared eyes. Its hind legs twist unnaturally in the wire, kicking like maybe, just maybe, if it tried hard enough it could get away.

The wind whistles through the tree line with the truth of its being; It wants to live.

And Leon knows, knows he could let it go. He could pry the trap open, let it bolt back past the underbrush, pretend none of this ever happened—that he didn’t set the trap, that he never saw it here at all, that he wouldn’t have to do what he does next.

His hands are gentle despite their intention. They press into the rabbit’s soft side, he can feel the rapid, terrified stutter of its heart, the warm way its flesh sings beneath his palms.

Leon’s mouth goes dry.

The knife feels heavier than it should when he pulls it from his back pocket, the weight of it strangely unfamiliar despite the way it’s molded to his hold. 

The rabbit’s fragile body spasms against him, claws like knives of their own scrape at his wrist, sharp pinpricks against his skin, weak but insistent all the same. He can hear its breath, sharp and fast, the pitiful, wheezing struggle of it.

It’s suffering.

Quick, it has to be quick. A clean kill is a kind kill.

There’s a sharp wet sound, the parting of skin, sinew, muscle.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

But still, the blood comes fast.

It spills in a hot rush over Leon’s fingers, thick and slick it seeps into the creases of his palms, painting his knuckles in something dark and final. It soaks into the cuff of his sleeve, and the sharp copper stench of it is what makes his stomach turn.

Something ugly coils in his gut. He wants to call it nausea, but it isn’t—not entirely. There is something else, something worse, something hotter that curls low in his ribs, twisting there, sick and shameful.

Satisfaction.

The realisation makes his skin break out in gooseflesh.

Leon shoves back, scrambling to his feet so fast he goes lightheaded, stumbling to regain his balance. His breath comes sharp, his fingers shaking where they hover in front of him, bloodied and trembling. His heart pounds, hammering a violent rhythm against his ribs.

He told himself he wouldn’t do it, but the truth stains him anyway.

The blood is gone by morning but it still lingers on Leon’s hands like a phantom second skin. 

He had scrubbed them raw, yet no matter how long he had tried for, he could still smell the copper, still see the red. He rubs his hands together absently even now, like he can still feel the slick between his fingers, he flexes his hands like the blood might come back if he catches the light just right. 

But then your voice comes, your gentle talking. Something soft that drones on in its mundanity that cuts right through the thick fog in his head.

He is sitting on the edge of your bed when he turns his head towards you, slow, like waking up from a dream, and for a second all he sees is light.

Sunlight filters in through thin lace curtains, catching in the strands of your hair. It spills liquid gold over your shoulders, and the fine edges of your form, seeps into where he can make out the curve of your waist through the thin cotton of your dress, the swell of your hips and the lines of your thighs. Dust swirls in the glow around you, disturbed only by your movement as you tiptoe around your room, drifting from one thing to the next with a sort of absentminded grace Leon is sure he’s only ever seen you possess.

He thinks you look like an angel—wings of spun sunlight, gilding at the edges, a halo to match. The pretty cadence of your voice like angelsong that falls from gentle lips. He figures then, that you, bathed in heaven-yellow light, just might have been sent to save him. The heat of you is enough to keep him warm, stave off the cold that splits open inside him.

Your voice carries on, talking between verses, words scattered like leaves in autumn breeze, thoughts half-formed and entirely weightless.

He figures you don’t expect him to answer, not really, not with the way you ask a question and move onto the next. He nods where is needed and smiles where he should, and it seems to be enough for you. Leon finds a comfort in it, the way you let yourself exist near him so easily, like he belongs here with you. 

And he does. That he is sure of.

You look untouched by his morning, by the things you don’t yet know he’s done. You smell like warm cotton, like candle wax and old wooden pews, like the incense that used to curl up toward the vaulted ceiling of the church. Like Sunday. 

Your voice is light as you pluck up a book from your desk. “I wanted to bring you with me to service this morning. But you never showed.”

Leon says nothing.

You glance at him, then back at the book. “You’d have liked the sermon, I think.”

He doesn’t tell you where he was. He doesn’t tell you he didn’t show because he had woken before dawnfire slanted over the horizon, before the church bells rang, before the town stirred to life. He doesn’t tell you that while you had buttoned yourself into something light and lovely, Leon had spilt his first blood.

"Have you read this one?" You ask, flashing the battered cover of the book in your hand.

He barely sees it. Shakes his head.

You hum, tossing it onto the bed beside him. "You should.”

He won’t. But he won’t tell you that either.

You move again, the scent of you trailing in your wake. You step lightly over a pair of old boots left haphazardly by your door, bare feet on creaking wood, unbothered by the silence he’s wrapped himself in.

There is something about you. Something radiant, something unbearable. Something that aches to be looked upon.

He glances away, jaw tight.

You don’t know. You don’t know.

He should feel ashamed. He does.

“Leon?”

His eyes snap up.

You’re watching him now, head tilted slightly like a naïve fawn, brow creased just enough to let him know you see something fraying, something untangling.

He doesn’t say anything.

You step closer, and it’s an unfortunate instinct—something old and hardwired—that makes him tense.

"You’re quiet," you say.

Leon exhales through his nose, like you amuse him. "You always say that."

You huff a quiet laugh. "I know. But you’re quiet in a different way."

Again, he doesn’t answer.

You kneel in front of him, peering up at him like you’re trying to see inside. Like if you could, you’d splinter apart his chest and peek between the looms of his ribs to find his heart, like you might find love there, and not this sickness in its place instead.

It makes him ill, the way you look at him.

Oh, you don't know. You don't know what he is.

“Are you okay?”

Push

“Yeah.” He insists.

"Are you sure?"

Push.

"I said yeah."

"You don’t seem okay—"

Push.

"Will you drop it?"

It comes out sharp, harsher than he intends, and you still instantly. Deer caught in headlights.

Leon doesn’t raise his voice, not to you, never to you. To you, he is gentle hands that hold, soft lips that kiss, a kind heart that loves. You have never known him as anything other than that.

You blink up at him, lips parting slightly, your breath caught somewhere in the cavern of your throat.

Leon swallows. Regret is instant and hits like a fist, it makes his stomach cave in. But still it doesn’t cool the flicker of anger, the frustration. It still curls hot in his gut, climbing its way up his throat like a vice.

“You’re being mean.”

It shouldn’t gut him the way it does.

You don’t say cruel, or violent, or dangerous. Just mean. Like he’s a child, a boy caught shoving another in the schoolyard. Like he hasn’t done things worse than this, than raise his voice.

It is like an awful stinging brand to the marrow of his bone. A verdict. A sentence.

Mean.

Not the thing he fears he is, not the monster he’s convinced himself lives beneath his skin. 

His mouth opens, but nothing comes. No apology, no defense.

He needs to leave, needs to wrench himself from this moment before it swallows him whole, before he drowns in the guilt of it.

Leon stands abruptly, and you flinch. It’s slight—just the smallest flicker of movement—but he catches it, and the sight of it nearly drives him to his knees.

He shouldn’t be here, not when he’s still raw with anger, with whatever awful thing is stirring inside him, with the taste of it thick like molasses on his tongue.

So he doesn’t look at you when he goes, doesn’t wait for you to tell him to stay, doesn’t let himself want to.

He kills a man that night.

Leon didn’t mean to—truly, really, he didn’t. He can’t even remember the moment it happened.

The night had been old, an hour close to dusk that made him restless. Leon finds himself at the homestead once more, circling the bones of a place that no longer feels like home.

He had been leaving when it happened, the weight of his knife heavy in his hand as he tossed it, caught it, tossed it, caught it, tossed it, caught it. 

There was no rabbit, but that was a good thing, he thought. A sigh of relief.

And yet, despite it, there had been a man.

Leon didn’t recognize him. Not from town, but maybe passing through, maybe someone old or someone new. It didn’t matter, not then.

The night had been cold and blue, and there was no gilding light of yours to keep him warm. And Leon; he had ached terribly for something, anything, that made him feel as alive as you did.

So he had wielded his knife.

And the moment it happened, there had been nothing. No divine intervention, no reckoning from above. The sky remained starless, silent, watching but not bearing witness. He remembers the sharp crack of bone, the whisper of a breath spilling from the man’s lips. 

Then, startling silence.

It had been so quick. The knife had driven up into his chest, right through the middle. A clean kill is a kind kill, after all.

A sharp breath had hitched in Leon’s throat then, something close to horror, maybe regret. It had come and gone in an instant, but it had been there, lodging itself in the back of his mind. And now, standing over the body of a man he does not know, hands tacky with already cooling blood, he should feel something more.

Shouldn’t he?

But still the sky does not split open, and the earth does not swallow him whole. He is not cast down, nor is he lifted up.

Instead, he feels nothing at all.

The man had barely struggled, hadn’t screamed nor kicked. It hadn’t wanted to survive the same way the rabbit had.

Leon tells himself that should make it better. He shouldn’t feel guilty if the man had no fight in him. If it had been quick. If it had been easy. Still, something churns deep in his stomach, a sickness that lingers behind his ribs. It gnaws at him as he kneels down, as his fingers skim across cooling flesh.

No. His mind speaks with a finality he cannot defer, if he stops now, he’ll feel it. The ache, the emptiness, the unbearable weight of knowing what he’s done.

So he keeps going.

And when the body is found by the old railway tracks the next morning, it is dismembered. Skin peeled away, ribbons of flesh left in its wake.

First the sheriff is called. Then the detectives. Then the priest.

Because this is the sort of town that still believes in damnation, in reckoning. That still believes a man’s soul can be unspooled from his body if his sins are dark enough, if his death is brutal enough, if his memory means enough.

The town hums with the news of it, a low, uneasy sort of murmur curling through the streets like a thick fog. Leon has heard the same thing all day long.

Did you hear? A man by the railway this morning. A single knife wound, right between the ribs. Someone must’ve known what they were doing.

But Leon didn't know. He didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t. He tells himself that over and under and over again until it is the only thing he knows.

He tries to ignore how his breath catches in his throat when he hears the whispers, tries not to flinch when his boss leans over the register and mutters, It’s just not right.

Instead, he stares at the rows of screws and bolts and lockboxes he’s organised and reorganised all morning, every object neat and harmless in its purpose, and tells himself again:

It wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t.

What Leon feels isn’t fear. No, it’s not quite that, but something close to it.

Because if there was no judgment the night it happened, will it come later? Will it slip through the cracks, find him in the dark?

Leon hadn’t even been rostered today, but he had insisted. Said he didn’t mind, needed the extra hours, said he needed the money.

The truth was, he needed noise. Needed the consistent, reliable clang of metal and the hum of fluorescents, needed to feel the ache in his arms from hauling boxes of nails and guttering and rat traps.

He figured the busy come-and-go of customers might be enough to keep his mind from wandering. But it isn’t.

Not when every passing face is a little too curious, a little too eager. Not when the newspaper sits folded by the register, inked with a headline he doesn’t dare read. Not when the wrench in his hand feels a little too much like the weight of his knife.

The bell chimes.

There you are.

Sunlight at your back, one hand curled around the strap of your bag. Your presence is enough to ease the ache in his chest like a balm, a smile like the sun on your lips. 

You lean up against the counter and for a minute you look like a timid animal—smiling still, but fiddling with the strap of your bag, like you’re not sure whether to stay or go, like coming here was a decision you second-guessed the whole way over. Leon hopes you’ll stay. Of course, you do.

“Hey, handsome,” you greet like always, but the words come out funny, like they don’t quite fit the shape of your mouth. You clear your throat and try again, “I— uhm, m’sorry about last night.”

Leon’s mind lurches. A hop, a skip, and a sharp turn into the white hot memory of last night—blood, copper-bright under moonlight, a gasping mouth, wide open eyes. You know, you know, you know.

“I didn’t mean to push you so hard,” come your next words. And each one comes back in pieces, a slow realisation, like waking up from a dream. Oh, he thinks. Not that.

He’d half forgotten how he’d treated you the night before, all sharp edges and words that were meant to cut. He’d forgotten the way you’d wavered. You’d just tried to help, his sweet girl. He’d worried you, and then, because that wasn’t enough, he’d hurt you some more. 

Mean, you’d called him.

The guilt that had been sitting heavy in his stomach shifts, grows roots, spreads like ivy through his ribs. He stays silent for a beat too long, and your lips—your pretty, angel lips—pull into the softest frown.

And guilt is a tidal wave that pulls him under.

“I didn’t— no, I’m sorry.” He says, ducks his head into your line of sight, enough to give you a half smile, enough to tick your lips back up just a little. The relief that comes with seeing it is instant. “I’m sorry, alright? Was my fault, I’ve been a bad boyfriend.”

“S’okay,” you beam easily, like that’s all it took. A barely-there apology, no penance required, and your heart is in his hands once more. Yours to give and his to hold.

It’s okay, you say. It makes Leon’s stomach curdle, because he thinks, if he pressed a knife to your throat, you would only look at him like this—soft, bright, sun-warmed—and show him where to cut.

The thought is sudden and unwelcome and it makes his insides turn out, makes him sick and sour. He couldn’t hurt you, wouldn’t, won’t. 

You’re his summer rain, spring sunshine.

Easily, you reach into your bag, unaware of the thoughts in his head, and slide that same book from the day before across the counter. 

“I think you’d like it,” you insist, and Leon doesn’t have the heart to deny you any longer.

He takes the book, pages curling and spine breaking, and flips through it. “I’ll read it.”

You beam again. The sun.

Leon doesn’t really read the book. 

He tries, he really does, but it’s hard to focus on the words when the only thing on his mind is how you’d kissed him earlier that night.

He’d climbed through your window like he always does, and you’d pulled him into a desperate kiss the second he’d stumbled into your room. He hadn’t had a choice but to melt into your arms. It had felt like coming home.

He presses two fingers to his lips, still warm from where you’d kissed and sucked and bitten, giggled into his mouth so bright and easy. He feels his pulse thrum beneath his touch and licks his lips to savour the taste.

The book in his lap is half-forgotten. Its cover is a little torn, pages aged and dog-eared. It feels like a piece of you he is privileged enough to carry in his hands.

Romeo and Juliet.

He finds it ironic, despite everything, that you wanted him to read it so badly. His eyes dart over inky text, words that swim and shift like the river that bends behind the homestead, a gentle rush of water that serves as a lulling ambience to his solitude.

He finds a passage, one that you’ve underlined in red pen.

These violent delights have violent ends, it reads. A strange sort of line for you to find interest in, he thinks. He wonders why you picked it, what went through your mind when you highlighted it.

His eyes skim back up the page, trying to garner some context.

Love-devouring death do what he dare—

It is enough I may but call her mine

A hollow sort of breath escapes him, because all Leon can think about is you. Your gaze, eversoft and unwavering, like you see his jagged edges and want him all the same.

And it is true, he thinks, it is enough he may but call you his. 

The thought creeps in once more, his knife, your throat, those eyes he loves that would shimmer with tears. 

He thinks about you beneath him, if you’d dig half moons into his shoulders with your nails, if you’d let him drag the knife over your chest and press the blade to your sternum. How you’d gasp so prettily. He wonders what your blood would look like, taste like. It’s thrilling in it’s sickness, lovely in its ghastliness. 

He snaps out of his thoughts in time with the sweet call of birdsong. 

A bluebird perched in a tree across the river, awake at an hour like this. 

He snaps the book shut and moves to make his way home, dusting dirt off his pants and walking his way down the bend of the river back towards the homestead.

The mud beneath his boots squishes with each step, reeds parting as the sun rises to greet the sleepy town like always, shades of pink and purple bleeding into a midnight sky.

It is not until Leon nears the tree line once more, that he hears another strange sound. A voice, gentle and soft, laughing prettily from somewhere deeper in the brush.

Leon finds himself following the curious sound back down the riverbend, the sound of laughter, light and bell-like, carries through the trees like a silver mist, weaves through the reeds and cattails. 

He stills at what he sees.

Further down the creek, where the water teeters off and runs clear through the rocks, a figure stands with their back to him. A girl, he realises. Young, bright, wearing a dark dress, she stands knee-deep in the water, her arms crossed against the chill, head tilted back as she watches a boy shrug on his shirt, press a gentle kiss to her forehead, and disappear back into the brush, leaving her alone in the shallows.

Leon should leave. 

He should turn around and walk away, pretend he never saw her, pretend he wasn’t here at all.

But then she hums, a soft, gentle lilt, and something in his gut pulls.

He doesn’t remember wading in. He doesn’t remember the moment she notices him—just that she turns, eyes going wide in the dark, lips parting like she might speak his name.

His name.

For a split second, the world narrows to the space between them. To her breath, sharp and hitched in her throat. To the way she sways slightly in the water, caught between fear and recognition. She isn’t a stranger, is she?

The silence between them feels like a choice.

Then, the choice is gone.

He moves before he can think. A hand to the throat, a push, the sudden burst of movement as she fights. She is stronger than he expects.

The river churns around them, frothing and thrashing as though it too wants to resist him. She fights the way people pray. Desperately, recklessly, full of blind and furious belief. Her hands scrabble at his wrists, her legs kick up mud from the riverbed, silt blooms dark in the water like ink spilled across a page.

Her mouth breaks the surface for just a second, one precious second, and the sound that leaves her is something raw, something torn from deep inside her ribs. A plea, a sob, a name, maybe. His. God’s. Does it matter?

Leon’s breathing is sharp, his pulse quick and importunate in his ears. Her hair floats like ribbons around them, tangling between his fingers, dragging across his arms. His grip tightens, his body locks against the current, against her twisting, bucking frame.

She looks a bit like you, Leon thinks. Hair the colour of yours, eyes that cry the same way yours do.

This is the closest he will ever get to killing you.

He knows this, swallows hard, and tightens his grip. Finality is the way he holds her under.

He wonders if this is what Othello felt, pressing a pillow to Desdemona’s lips. If this is what God felt, when he sent the flood.

It takes longer than he thought it would.

Long enough for him to feel the strength ebb from her body in slow, rattling increments—until the fight is just... gone. Her hands fall away from his wrists, her body goes slack and the water cradles her gently, like a lover.

And still, he cannot let her go.

His breath comes in uneven, fitful bursts now. His hands are shaking, his hands are shaking.

He watches the last breath slip from her lips in a plume of air bubbles, scattering like stars on the surface of the water. The last thing she gives to the world.

Then, finally, he releases her.

He staggers back, the bank uneven beneath his feet. He watches her body now, drifting softly down the current, her hair fans out like a halo against the pale shimmer of the river. His hands are still shaking near-hysteric now, still caught up in the phantom of her struggle, in the memory of her weight underneath him.

Something in his gut twists.

This should be enough.

He tells himself that, standing there, breath sharp and uneven, blood roaring through his skull. This should be enough. This should quiet it. This should—

He swallows thickly.

He won’t know until he sees you again.

It’s not until he’s made his way back to your window, climbing inside, finding you curled up in the sheets, warm and still and alive, that he realises he’s still shaking. He winds his arms around you, pressing his face to your shoulder, inhaling deep, trying to sink into the scent of you, the presence of you, the proof of you.

By the time the boy returns to the riverbed, the creek is empty, the water is still, and the girl in the dark dress is nowhere to be found.

The church suffocates you. 

Stained glass windows cast slanted beams of bleeding gold and bruised violet across the pews, coloring the clamour of mourners in fractured, dancing lights. The air is stifled with too many bodies pressed into too-small a space, with incense and thick heat, and the cloying smell of day-old lilies that have since grown soft.

You sit in the second row, hands white-knuckle-tight stitched together in your lap. Despite not having spoken for days, there is a rawness that scratches your throat from the inside out, like you’ve swallowed something sharp and it’s lodged itself there, unable to go down. Maybe it is the weight of your grief, your regret, your guilt.

Someone speaks at the podium, a voice that barely cuts through the static hum that reverberates around your skull. Muddy words drift from there to here.

She was kind, she was bright, she was loved.

You hear every word, yet each one passes through you like wind through hollow bones.

It doesn’t quite feel real when they lower her into the earth. You try to remember the last thing she said to you, but cruelly, all your memories blur at the edges, overtaken by a litany of others—her bloated corpse washed up on the riverbed, her hair tangled between the reeds, the outline of her dress like dark wings fluttering beneath the water. 

You picture her gasping for air.

The thought guts you clean in half, and your tears threaten to spill before you can blink them away. 

Leon’s hand finds yours.

His fingers press into your palm, grounding and warm, as if he’s trying to anchor you to something beyond the weight of your grief. You squeeze back, hard enough to bruise.

And Leon lets you—lets you hurt him, lets you crush his hand in yours like the pain might balance out the weight of his guilt. He welcomes it, craves it, even. Because this grief of yours, this need, your trembling trust, it’s the closest he knows he’ll ever come to redemption.

Because he knows the weight of the dirt being shoveled onto the coffin. Knows what it’s like to hold someone under, to feel the last of their fight fade out through their limbs, he knows the exact hue her lips turned when the light went out behind her eyes.

And now he stands beside you, the architect of your mourning, and lets you draw comfort from the same hands that stilled her heartbeat.

He wants to be good. For you. Just for you.

He watches your grief manifest while something sharp turns in his stomach. He hates this part. Not the killing. That, he has learnt to live with. But this aftermath, you, and the raw pain in your soft cries, it makes him sick.

And it sickens him even more, how much he loves the blind, aching way you cling to him. As if you still believe his hands could do nothing but hold. That he would never hurt you. As if you don’t feel her ghost breathing between you.

Autumn gives way to blistering winter, winter on the cusp of newfound spring. The town exhales, slowly, warily, like it’s forgotten how to breathe without bracing for bad news. The snow that had settled itself over everything—over gravestones and shuttered windows, over street signs and the lonely traffic light in town—begins to thaw.

And with it, Leon watches you come undone by inches. A thousand little deaths, none of them final. He thought by now your aching heart would’ve healed, warmed with the coming seasons. But instead, he watches you lose pieces of yourself day by day. You stop painting your nails, you don’t come into town anymore, don’t visit him at work like you used to. 

When he comes by your window some nights, with not another sound to fill the silence, he hears you crying. And he can’t bear himself to climb in, wouldn’t know how to offer a semblance of the solace you deserved. 

Leon feels like he’s losing you. 

And it’s furious, the hopeless way he runs his mind in circles. There is no more bloodshed because he sees no reason, no more bodies to be found because Leon’s knife has been tucked neatly into the drawer next to his bed ever since the funeral service. 

Because what does it matter, if you don’t look at him like you used to? If your laughter doesn’t chase itself down the hallway of his heart anymore?

What use is ruin without worship? Worship without ruin?

But still, violence has since become as familiar an organ as his heart is to his body. 

On restless nights, he dreams of you dead. With your face turned heavenward, just like hers had been, your eyes wide open, but the light gone out. And he wakes gasping, as if the world could not possibly go on without you in it. As if the very thought of you leaving him in this cold, dark, world would kill him too. 

It reminds him of the deer.

He must’ve been eight, maybe nine. The sun was low in the sky, his father was tired. He’d hit a doe just outside of town, off the road, far enough away that nobody would care enough to clean her carcass off the road. 

She didn’t die right away, she’d staggered, then crumpled right there beside the road, steam rising and curling from her body.

And every day after, they passed her in the truck on the way home.

The first day, she looked peaceful, her legs tucked up beneath her like she might stir if the wind coaxed her kindly enough. The second day, her eyes were gone—eaten out, maybe, or just caved in by time. By the third day, her ribs peeked through the belly, white as the moon. And on the fourth, there was nothing but a melted smear of a black shape left behind.

Fur turned to hide. Hide to sinew. Sinew to rot.

He thinks of that deer when he dreams of you.

 And each time, you rot faster, fade sooner. The curve of your mouth becomes less familiar, the slope of your nose wrong, wrong, wrong. You morph and twist and change, until the shape of you is something unrecognisable, nothing more than an impression printed into the backs of his eyelids.

So, in the wake of what he knows, Leon finds himself by your window again. You’ve left it open like always, but he still finds himself knocking. Three gentle raps.

“Come in,” you say quietly, welcoming him into your dying warmth. You’re curled on your bed in the half-light, the bulb in your bedside lamp sputtering with the soft whine of something close to death.

“Hi, sunshine.”

You glance up, tired-eyed, a little smile tugging at the corner of your mouth. That nickname again—ridiculous and ill-fitting now, like summer clothes in winter.

“I think your lamp’s giving up,” he adds, stepping inside. “Probably tired of listening to the same sad music on repeat.”

For weeks now, your room has been a graveyard of bitter melody, he’s sure you’ve worn out every record you own. You’ve played Dust by Fleetwood Mac until the grooves wore thin, spun Blue until Joni Mitchell’s voice felt stitched into your ribs.

You roll your eyes despite him, but it’s fond all the same. “So fix it.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He moves toward the nightstand with mock solemnity, fiddling with the bulb as if it requires real effort. It flickers back to life with a reluctant hum.

He turns to you then, the golden glow casts him in sepia. He looks like a photograph you’d keep in a locket close to your heart.

“Better?” he asks.

You nod. “Yeah. Thanks.”

He kneels beside your bed, brushing the hair from your eyes with the backs of his fingers. Then, he hooks one finger beneath your quilt, pulls the blanket down just to kiss your chapped lips softly.

You don’t feel like you deserve his kindness or the warmth he offers you so freely, like you should live in the shape of your sadness forever. But you let him anyway because grief makes you greedy. He kisses your cheeks next, one then the other, your nose last. His hands cradle the sides of your face, rough palms that have never felt softer to you.

He loves you, this you know. And you will hold onto it selfishly if it is all you have left.

“I hate seeing you like this,” he admits softly. The words are like a sinking stone in your chest. For a breath, you feel ashamed—like your sorrow is a burden he’s been forced to carry. He’s hurting too, you’ve known that for a while. The heaviness in his eyes and the weight of his smile speaks a thousand unsaid words.

But what exactly he’s mourning, you do not know. You wish you could fix it anyway.

“I know,” you murmur softly at last. “I’m sorry.”

Leon studies you quietly, tender blue looks at you like you're precious and breakable all at once. He kisses you softly once more, draws your hands from beneath the blanket and holds them in his own, lacing your fingers together like they belong together.

“Come with me,” He says, nodding towards the window, the rush of dying winter air billowing the lace curtains.

“Where to?” You ask, confusion lacing your brows together.

“Does it matter?”

It doesn’t. So you follow him. Sneak out your window like Rapunzel. Leon helps you down, your bare feet skid across the shingles, arms windmilling once before you tumble—soft and graceless—into the sleeping brush below.

He braces for the worst, and yet you laugh. Something soft and sudden it startles the birds from the trees, and it’s like colour floods his being.

He takes you somewhere secret, a quiet hush-hush between gentle laughter the whole way through the thinning woods. 

The trees are not dense where you live on the outskirts of the prairie, they stretch like spindles toward the sky, bark peeled back by time and winter wind. They do not grow thick here, only tall—long, reaching limbs that vanish into the mist. As a child, you once imagined climbing them straight into heaven, fingers grazing the stars.

You trudge shoulder to shoulder. The snow has thinned, melted to a slippery slush along the roots and rocks. You spot the first crocus bloom peeking out beside a fallen log, delicate and purple as a bruise. The woods are waking. And so, maybe, are you.

The radio tower rises suddenly, summoned from the earth itself.

It stands at the highest point of the valley. Its metal skeleton weathered and rusted, cables like veins strung between its limbs. Once, it must have pulsed with light and signal, voices skipping across the hills in Morse-coded static.

He takes your hand and leads you up the spindly ladder, each rung groans under your weight, as your breath fogs in the air. Higher and higher you go, until the town becomes a scatter of lights beneath you, until the forest is a patchwork, stitched into the earth like a quilt.

And finally, when you get to the top, tearing your skirt free from where it catches on loose wire, you feel alive for the first time in a long time. 

The wind cleaves straight through you, sharp and unforgiving, but you like the way it bites your skin, whips your hair about in all sorts of directions.

“This is magic,” you say, words coated in disbelief. The entire town looks like a tiny playset from up here.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” You hear him before you feel him, the brush of his shoulder against yours as he leans against the rusted railing with you. The tower creaks gently under your shared weight.

You just stand there, taking it all in. Your breath puffs in the chill, slow and even. He hasn’t seen you breathe like this in months.

“I can’t wait to leave this town,” you say suddenly, voice soft, threaded with something close to wonder.

Leon doesn’t move. Just watches the way your eyes drift toward the horizon, like you’re already halfway gone.

“I used to think I’d miss it,” you go on, “but now… I don’t know. I think I’m ready for college. To move on, maybe. To start something new.” You laugh, quiet and a little sheepish, turn to look at him. “Isn’t that awful? I feel like I’m supposed to stay here. Be sad forever.”

He opens his mouth. Closes it again.

“It’s not awful,” he says, but the words taste like a bitter lie. It is awful. It’s so horribly awful that you’d ever imagine a life for yourself in which he doesn't exist.

New city, new people. Where does he fit in that picture?

A strange kind of panic stirs in his chest. You, leaving. You, gone. He can’t bear the thought of a world without you. One where he doesn’t get to hear you laugh, see you smile. One where you don’t follow him around or ask him pointless questions just to hear his voice.

He imagines your bedroom window with the light switched off.

The thought unmoors him. 

He can see the homestead from here, a darkness exuding so potently the shadows flicker in the corner of his eye all the way from up here. 

He glances back at you, and thinks consciously, for the first time in a while, how easy it’d be to keep you. 

The voice in his head is gentle. Persuasive. It sounds a little like love.

So he makes his decision, albeit painstakingly, but with the sort of deliberation that feels, in some twisted corner of his mind, like mercy.

He tries not to. For weeks, he tries. Tries to reason with himself, the way one might try to wean a wild dog off affection. 

His knife spills new blood. A rabbit. A dog. Something dumb and soft and unknowing, something helpless with a heartbeat loud enough to quell the sickening desire. He tries, desperately, to let you go in ways that might make it easier. Like if he staves the copper-in-his-mouth urge off for long enough, it’ll suffice.

But still, it’s fruitless. He knew it would be, and still, still, still, he tried.

He sees you in his dreams every night, lit from within and haloed in memory. He sees your silhouette in every open doorway and hears your voice whisper in the trees. A vision, beautiful and doomed all at once.

So when the crocuses finally come into full bloom, when the leaves sprout on the trees once more and the promise of spring begins to breathe warm into the soil, he asks.

Come with me. Where to? Does it matter? 

And again, it doesn’t, because your trust bleeds deeper than your rationality, because you were born with a lamb’s heart and a martyr’s bones.

So you follow him, blindly, faithfully. Like you always have, like you always will.

There is a stillness to you that day, a gentleness in the way you’re soft with sleep and the chilly air, hair tangled, sleeves pulled over your hands to stave off the biting morning cold. He watches you trail after him through the tall grass and he thinks, with a pulse of something close to reverence: you have no idea.

The knife is a secret that rides in his back pocket. He feels it dig into the waistband of his jeans with every step. 

He hates how easy it is. Hates how willing you are to go wherever he leads. It fills him with something hot and guilty and half-divine.

The walk itself is long. The sun shifts slowly overhead, dappling the earth through the branches just beginning to bud. Wind stirs the field grass into waves while you talk, albeit quietly. You fill the silence with idle nothings—how the birds chirp louder now, how the bees have started to come back, how it finally feels like almost spring. Your voice has always been birdsong to him. He can’t quite bear the thought of never hearing it again, and he steps a little closer to you, as if it’ll help, as if it could keep you tethered together for a while longer.

Still, he takes a small, strange comfort in the math of it, that even once you're gone, he won't have long to wait.

For less than a breath, and no more than a second.

Then you’ll be together again—wherever that is. Forever, at last.

The path to the homestead is overgrown, wild with creeping vine and honeysuckle. Nature reclaiming what man abandoned. The trees part at the prairie’s edge like curtains drawn open, and there it is—the house.

It’s worse than he remembers although he was just here a few days ago.

Peeling paint, sun-bleached boards, the screen door hanging crooked on one hinge, yawning open like a jaw. A place haunted by the many lives before it.

“Creepy,” you murmur, your voice light but not mocking as you stop at the threshold to the front door. You glance back at him, lips lifting at one corner. “Strange choice for a date.”

He swallows the laugh that wants to crawl up his throat. Instead, he says, “Thought you might appreciate the quiet.”

You hum thoughtfully and push the door open by the palm of your hand, the house sighs as the door swings open, as if welcoming you home. Dust blooms in the shaft of sunlight that follows you in, and the air smells like mildew and old wood.

“You really used to come here?” you ask, glancing at him over your shoulder.

Leon nods curtly, grinding his teeth. “When I needed to be alone.”

You tilt your head, puppy-dog cute in your innocence. “That sounds sad.”

He shrugs, and in the moment of silence that follows, you don’t press; you never do. That’s what makes this harder, that endless, bottomless trust. He could feed you poison and you’d thank him for the sweetness of it.

You reach for his hand without hesitation, squeeze it once, and that’s what undoes him a little more, how easily you slip your fingers into his, how warm they are, how alive. It makes him feel divine and monstrous all at once. Like a god with a worshipper who doesn’t yet know the mausoleum she stands in was built for her bones.

You explore without fear, toeing across warped floorboards and peer into the cold fireplace, play peek-a-boo with the torn curtains and warped doorways. You run your finger along the mantle and leave behind a line in the grime.

“Feels like something out of a ghost story,” you murmur, half to yourself.

Leon just watches you from the doorway. 

Because you are the ghost. Or maybe he is. Maybe this whole house is just some purgatory he’s invented for the both of you to fall into together.

He follows you in eventually, his footsteps more timid than yours. Like one wrong move might wake something sleeping under the floorboards.

You drift from room to room like you’ve known this place for many lifetimes. He watches you go, follows behind, and thinks he should tell you everything, spill it like bile. Let the sickness come up and out and give you the chance to run.

“You okay?” you hum. 

He nods only because lying feels easier than truth, and because you already look so proud of him for letting you in.

Finally, you end up in the living room. It is near empty; a fireplace, twin bookshelves on either side, and a sunken, moth-eaten couch pushed against the far wall. It’s dusty and old, springs breaking loose, but you sit anyway, curling your legs beneath you. Leon finds his place beside you, close enough to share your warmth. You lean your head on his shoulder with a long, contented sigh, and he swears he hears the altar creak beneath you both.

“I like it here,” you murmur. “It’s quiet. Feels like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.”

It doesn’t. Not anymore. There’s only this moment, this house, this version of you, of him.

And something in Leon whispers soft and sweet, that he doesn’t have to do this. He could keep you instead. Love you right.

He turns his face into your hair and breathes you in.

He thinks: I’ll take it back. I’ll take it all back.

You kiss him before he can say it. Just a brush of your lips against his jaw, soft and searching. He turns to meet it, and your mouth finds his. He doesn’t deserve it, but he kisses you like he might anyway. The kiss lacks the desperation Leon feels bone-deep. The desperation to seek penance for the sins he is still yet to commit. Like if you forgive him now, none of it will matter. His hands tangle in your shirt, mouths barely parted but pressed in urgency nonetheless.

“I missed you,” you whisper, and he almost confesses everything then. Almost lays it at your feet like a bloodied offering.

But he just kisses you again and again and again. Slower this time, gentler, thumb brushing your cheek as he pours himself into you. And it becomes so easy to believe he can have this, that he can be this man, the one you see.

You shift into his lap, lithe and loose-limbed with leftover kiss. The taste of him still lingers, something like salt-sweet sweat on your lips.

Leon doesn’t move, but his eyes follow the curve of your face. Studies you for the last time, tries to memorise the way your eyes glimmer with life and your smile curves just for him, him, only him.

Your hands brush the hair that always falls into his eyes from his face, curl gently behind his ear and tuck it in place. You kiss the corner of his mouth, then trail your lips along the line of his jaw. Fingers wander, slow and idle, tracing the path you’d just followed with your mouth, down the strong column of his throat. You feel him swallow. 

Hands gentle as ever, sweep down and drag across the front of his shirt, slip lower still, curving down the arc of his waist, and that’s when they catch the edge of something tucked into his waistband.

He stiffens beneath you.

You tug gently, and Leon grabs your wrist with force enough to bruise. The suddenness startles you.

You try to yank your wrist free. “Leon,” you huff, confusion cinching your brows together. Again, you yank but his grip only tightens. “You’re being weird—”

Finally, you pull free, and this time Leon doesn’t stop you when your hand reaches to pull out what hides at his back. InA hunting knife glints in your hand.

It is sturdy and sharp. Worn, but cared for. It gleams faintly in the low light, all violent, jagged edge.

And you laugh, not because it’s funny, but because you’re confused, and confusion always sounds like humor when you don’t know where else to put it.

“Is this—what, for bears?” you tease, turning it over in your hands. “What kind of date are we on, woodsman? You planning to skin me for my hide?”

It’s a joke. It is. You look up at him, expecting a smile, something muttered quietly under his breath, a quip in place of the look that meets you. But Leon doesn’t laugh, nor does he move. His eyes remain on the blade in your hands, head hung.

The silence grows roots between you.

Your smile falters. “...Leon?”

His jaw twitches in place of answer.

“Why do you have this?” Your voice is smaller now, thinner. You offer it back to him. “I mean—you don’t hunt. You hate hunting.”

He doesn’t take it, just looks at you, and for the first time, you don’t recognize what’s behind blue eyes.

“Leon?”

A terrible pause. And then, finally—

“I was going to kill you.”

It doesn’t make sense. 

The words land all wrong. Scattered in the space of your mind left for you to pick up and put together. Leon watches you, kind enough or cruel enough to let you do the math of your own undoing.

“What?”

He exhales hard, like something has at long last cracked loose in his chest. Like confession is a kind of relief. Like honesty makes this better.

“I was going to kill you,” he repeats, and this time, the words sink through your chest like a stone in water. A slow, sinking dread that blooms in the pit of your stomach.

Leon watches you with something close to awe. Or grief. It’s hard to tell with him now—his expression something unreadable. A blankness you’ve never seen before.

“I brought you here to— well, to end it. I couldn’t take it anymore. You, leaving. I couldn’t... I couldn’t let the world have you. Couldn’t bear the idea of you forgetting me.”

The silence that follows is so thick and cloying you can hear your pulse in it. Feel it inside your skull, pressing behind your eyes.

You stare at him, and for once, you don’t have any words. Just a mouth full of dry cotton and a heart knocking hard against your ribcage.

“But I changed my mind,” he says quickly, urgently, like that undoes the violence in the intent. “I did. You kissed me. You looked at me like I was still—still yours. And I realized I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to hurt you. I never did.”

You feel dizzy. The room tilts. 

“I love you,” he says. “God, I love you. And I didn’t want to lie to you anymore. So I’m telling you now. I’m being honest. Doesn’t that count for something?”

You shake your head minutely. Like you’re trying to knock the thoughts loose from where they stick to the walls of your skull. Like maybe, if you shake hard enough, you’ll wake up in your own bed, sunlight on the sheets.

“You were going to kill me,” you say, and the words taste foreign in your mouth.

Leon has the audacity to startle. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

You blink slowly. “You said you brought me here to kill me.”

“I said I couldn’t do it. That I changed my mind.” His voice rises without meaning to, cracking like dry wood. “I’m— I’m trying to be honest. That’s supposed to mean something.”

You realise you’re much too close for comfort. Funny how that works. Arms that once felt like home scare you enough to flinch when he moves. But your knee still brushes his while you sit on the moth-bitten couch, and the only thing you have to defend yourself is the knife still in your hand.

But he sees it. Sees your weight shift. Sees your eyes flick to the door, to the window, away from him.

“No—hey. No.” His voice drops to a raggedy whisper. “Don’t— I’m right here.”

You’re trembling now. Not just because of what he’s said, but because of how quickly he changed. Because that blank, even calm has cracked open into something frightful. 

“I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m not,” he says again, as if repetition makes it truer.

Your mouth opens and closes uselessly. 

“You just— You said it so calmly.” Your voice cracks in fear.

Leon runs both hands through his hair, stands and paces two feet before circling back.

“I wasn’t calm,” he presses. “I was trying to be honest with you. You want me to lie instead? Pretend I didn’t think about it? Would that make you feel better?”

“You’re scaring me.”

“I changed my mind,” Leon’s voice is desperate, insistent, voice splintering as he sinks to his knees in front of you now. “I’m telling you, isn’t that worth something? Honesty should count.”

But the weight of his confession is not lightened by truth.

There is no nobility in admitting you once intended violence to the thing you claim to love. There is only a new kind of intimacy, one born not of affection, but of proximity to death.

You study him. The trembling of his hands, the wet glint in his eyes; and it is terrifying, how reasonable he sounds in his unraveling.

And more terrifying still, how he looks at you. Like a prophet would fire.

You are the last divine thing he believes in. Can’t you see? The only living being in the vastness of his mind that could save him. He has never known a love as pure as the one you had bestowed upon him. 

And so, he has built his altar.

He has knelt at it, trembling, devoted.

He has prayed to keep this—you. The purity of your love before it spoils. Before the world takes you and reshapes you into something that no longer needs him.

He would rather die by your hand than live in a world where you turn your face away.

And if you won’t kill him, if you recoil from him now, if you leave, then the death he imagined will come just the same. Not with blood, but in absence. In the slow, shriveling death of being forgotten.

You watch him. You feel the weight of his stare, of his worship, like a noose of silk. Lovely. Crushing.

And something inside you—call it instinct, call it survival—begins to recoil.

“I need to go,” you say, though the words come like a foreign tongue. Your voice doesn’t sound like your own.

It takes him a moment to hear you. Or perhaps he simply refuses. His head tips, slightly. His brow furrows.

“What?”

Your legs shift beneath you, unsteady. You glance toward the door, the night pressing up against it. Your mouth is dry. “I—I need to leave.”

He rises a little, not all the way as if he is following your movement with his own. 

“No,” he says, soft. “No, you don’t.”

“I do.” You stand. You don’t remember deciding to do it. You just know that you must. You have to get out, you have to get away, before this becomes something you can’t change.

His voice cracks as he rises after you.

“Don’t.” That’s all. Just that one word, full of ache. And then, if that is not enough—

“I love you.”

There is something utterly childlike in the way he says it. Not manipulative, not cruel. You’ve never realised just how blue his eyes look when he says I love you.

“I love you.” He says again. “I love you so much it scares me.”

It scares you too.

And as if he sees the fear in your eyes, he continues, hands coming up in surrender, palms open. “I don’t want to scare you,” he says quickly, restlessly. “That wasn’t—this isn’t how I wanted it to happen. I just… I thought if I told you the truth, that it would mean something. That you'd understand. I only meant—fuck, I just wanted to be with you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Your back bumps the wall, you didn’t even realize you were retreating.

Leon doesn’t notice just yet, caught in the undertow of everything he’s kept hidden. He keeps talking, words spilling out in a desperate, clumsy rush.

“I was going to do it. I was going to end it. I wasn’t gonna let you go alone. We’d be together. Just us. No one else.”

The room contracts. 

“Together?”

His face softens like he thinks you understand, like this is the moment he wins you back.

And then the silence tilts and shifts, because you do understand. Finally.

Not just what he said. But what he’s done.

He killed her, drowned her in that river. Killed that man, left him by the railway. The revelation is enough to make your lips part in a silent sort of scream, a gasp for air. 

Leon’s mouth is still moving—he’s saying something about fate, about love, about how he never wanted to hurt anyone but sometimes the darkness just wins.

Your vision goes hot around the edges as your stomach churns grossly, and before you realise what is happening, you double over without grace. The knife drops from your hand in an unceremonious clatter, and you slap the wall in a last attempt at balance. You’re going to be sick.

“Hey—hey,” Leon murmurs, stepping toward you, “you’re okay. Let me help—”

His hand brushes your arm and you recoil like it burns.

“Don’t touch me.”

You shove him back, and Leon stumbles, caught off balance, eyes wide with something that doesn’t look like understanding.

“Don’t touch me,” you say again, voice trembling with something more akin to fear than anger.

And when you look at him again, his sad blue eyes look like steel.

“You don’t mean that,” he says, quietly. “You’re just upset, confused.”

“Don’t— Don’t make me feel naïve.” You’re panting now. “You killed her. You killed her, Leon.”

“No, you don’t— You don’t get to say that. You don’t get to look at me like—”

You scramble to run before he can get all his words out.

But you barely make it two steps before he tackles you down, a mess of limbs and a flurry of panic. The floor rushes up too fast, your elbow cracks against it, and the air punches out of your lungs.

And in the struggle, his hands come down around your body; a vice, or a lover’s embrace, either way, suffocating.

“Let go,” and it’s only now you feel the wetness on your face, your tears cascading in tremulous waterfalls, warm and salt-bitten. “Please, Leon, let go.”

“I love you,” Leon says again, like it’s all he has left to offer, the only language his mouth remembers. “I love you, I love you.”

His breath is hot and frantic against your cheek. His hands tremble with a fevered sort of need, fight for purchase on your wrists, clammy with the truth of the sins that stain them. You can’t tell if the suffocation comes from his body atop yours, or from your sobs, which are so sharp now, so relentless, that breathing has become an afterthought.

You push at his chest with whatever strength remains in your trembling arms, but he’s stronger in desperation You try to push and push and push, but he’s twice as desperate now, pain scrambling to keep you still, to keep you his.

Your nails sink deep into his forearm, red half-moons rising, beading, bloating, where his skin breaks.

What happens next is instinct. 

Leon shoves you down and slaps you across the face. 

Blood floods your mouth instantly, warm against your tongue, and your eyes widen in shock. For a few short moments that feel like lifetimes, you can’t move. 

“You hit me,” you gasp, like it’s the worst of what has happened tonight. Like the fact of it is worse than all the other truths.

“You wouldn’t stay still,” Leon tries, eyes wide and lip trembling. “I’m sorry, you just wouldn't stay still—”

Your lip bleeds a beautiful crimson down the corner of your cheek, where his knuckle must have split the delicate skin. He watches it bloom and thinks of all the times he’s kissed you, those beautiful, soft lips.

He thumbs the blood away reverently, shaky and slow, smears it down the corner of your chin.

Leon lowers his head, lips close enough for your exhales to catch in each other’s throats. He could kiss you. He could kill you. The truth of it is terrifying.

His mouth presses to yours gently first, and for a few fleeting moments it’s familiar. Sweet and soft, like the boy you knew before. Then, his lips crush to yours in desperation—that’s all he seems to be now, the personification of desperation. 

You feel him tremble when he tastes the blood he put there. The tremble spreads through you. It’s all you can do not to scream.

You cry into the curve of his mouth because you cannot bring yourself to kiss him back. Sobs so hard and violent that your teeth clack against his, your body shuddering under the weight of it all. And still, still, still, he holds you like he thinks it might save him. Like he can love his way out of what he’s done.

You can taste your own grief with every press of his lips to yours, a dirty salt and a biting copper. 

And Leon, poor Leon, believes it means something. Still, despite everything, believes in the truth of your love.

You may call it naïvety, the way he trusts you so blindly, so much so that he doesn’t notice the way your hands shift, doesn’t feel the tension coiling in your legs, your knees folding slowly beneath him, measuring distance and breath. He’s too caught in the fantasy he’s spent weeks building, the one he gets to live in now. 

And in this moment of vulnerability, you shove him.

Leon falls backwards with a startled grunt, his balance off-kilter, arms too slow this time to catch you. His eyes are wide, wild and stunned, like he’s just been slapped awake.

Your palms slap the floor, catch the base of the stairs, claw at the banister. You drag yourself upright with what little strength is left in you, and bolt for the door. 

Sweat-slick hands of yours slip over the knob, desperate and clumsy in their desire to survive. Won’t budge. Locked, you realise with horrifying clarity. It’s locked. It hits you like an awful riptide, your own breath turning on you, as the panic settles in, and you barely even manage to duck as—

Leon lunges for you, a half-scream scratches its way up your throat, raw and aching on its way out. You pivot as fast as you can and crash back into the banister, your hands seize it like a lifeline, dragging yourself up with trembling legs, each step like a jolt to your nervous system. 

Up, up, up, you take the steps two at a time, Leon on your heels like thunder. You don’t need to chance a look over your shoulder, don’t dare when you can already feel his presence in the thick air, in the pulse of the house, in the way the walls seem to close in around you.

You hear him behind you, a string of sweet nothings that pleases for you to come back to him.

But you're smarter than that, even if a part of you wishes you weren’t. A part of you that wishes you could be naïve enough to crawl back into his arms and accept the twisted love he would kill himself to give you.

Your legs carry you down the hall, dizzy with panic as your vision blurs at the edges. You don’t know where you’re going, how you’ll escape.

Door. Door. Try a door.

The first one doesn’t budge, stuck fast, even as you rattle the handle desperately. You sob once, a sharp breath that tears from your throat, and keep going.

The second door is the same, jammed. 

Behind you, Leon’s boots thud against the last step and the floor creaks under his weight like the house gives you a warning.

“I didn’t mean to—” he pants, his voice echoing down the hallway towards you. “You have to know I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

You scream, sharp and terrified, and shove your weight into the third door. It finally gives under your weight and you tumble through, half-falling, half-running.

Leon’s hand slams flat against the door just before it shuts, fingers splayed wide like he means to claw the space between you apart. The handle jerks violently beneath your grip, the whole frame shudders under his weight as he tries to tear it open.

The cry that escapes you breaks his heart, but he can’t let you get away, not again. He loves you too much for that.

“Baby— sweetheart, please.” He begs, near hysterical, “I didn’t mean to— didn’t mean to scare you— You know I didn’t.”

You push back with everything you have, shoulder braced to the wood, feet skidding on the floor. Your heartbeat roars wildly in your ears, and you don’t realise you’ve replied until his voice comes back, soaked through with desperation.

“Stop? Stop? Why would I stop?” He emphasises his words with a harsh shove that makes you gasp in fear, “You don’t understand,” He convinces himself, “Sweetheart, let me help you understand, open the door.”

“Stop!” you shriek again. “Stop talking!”

He gives another push, enough so that the door swings open a few inches, and you see his eyes, once a cerulean, beautiful blue, now glassy, sanguine red.

“I can’t live without you,” he breathes, and it’s worse because it sounds true, his face is twisted with it. “You have to understand. I love you. I just wanted– I just needed—” You, you, you.

You scream to drown it out, wordless and panicked, and shove with everything you have. By a stroke of luck, his grip slips and the door slams shut and you twist the lock with haste. Your breath rattles in the cavern of your chest, and you wait, wait, wait. No sound comes, no movement, and just when you think it might be over, the whole frame rattles with a horrifying bang.

Quickly, you search the room for anything to barricade the door. Tucked into the corner by the door is a bookcase nearly half as tall as you. You move quickly, throw your weight against it, but even so it’s heavy. It does little but groan as it moves, sluggish and stubborn even as you push it with all your might.

Leon slams into the door again, so hard the frame begins to splinter. A terrified sob claws its way out of you.

“Please,” he begs, his voice echoing through the door.

Another bang, the walls rattle, a picture frame clatters off the wall and bursts across the floor in shards of glass.

“I know you’re scared, just— just let me in.”

The bookcase drags into place with a final grinding shriek of wood on wood. Your muscles scream. You heave again, one last time, and throw your weight against it until it finally, finally, topples over, crashing to the floor in front of the door with a thunderous bang that shakes the walls.

And at long last, silence greets you again.

Leon ceases his endless pursuit, the handle doesn’t tremble nor do the walls shake any longer.

Your hands, though, they tremble against your thighs as you double over, gasping for breath, chest tight with sobs you finally let spill out in their entirety. You don't know how long it lasts, this fleeting reprieve, but you don’t dare take it for granted.

Staggering back, you survey your surroundings.

The room you find yourself in is useless. No closet, not a back door. Just a battered desk, a thin rug, cracking wallpaper, and…

A window.

It’s small, too small even, but maybe—

You scramble to scale the desk in one desperate movement, knees thudding against its surface as your fingers feel along the window’s seam. There’s a metal lock, but it’s rusted shut. The glass is old and stubborn, and no matter how hard you yank, it won’t budge.

Leon calls through the door, rattling it’s handle.. “Sweetheart… you can’t leave. You can’t. I won’t know how to breathe without you.”

You brace your palms on the frame and try to lift the pane, but it doesn’t move. Painted shut. 

Rage rises in your throat—rage and helplessness and the sheer grief of it all. 

“No, no, no, no,” You reason, like this can’t be it, this can’t be how it ends. This house will not become your grave.

The thought of that alone makes you sob again, so you shove at the window harder, use the heel of your palm, then your elbow. Desperation overtakes the pain in your chest, and you pick the ceramic lamp off the desk, raise it high, and smash it through the glass.

Fragments rain across the room, glittering on the floor like ice. Yes! You nearly want to cry with joy. The cool night air rushes in all at once, cools the tears glistening on your cheeks. 

But then the door bursts open.

The old wood gives with a scream, the bookcase sliding uselessly across the floor. You whirl, heart in your throat. 

There stands Leon, he looks wild, desperate, gaze flitting immediately to you. You scramble, try to lift yourself through the window, as if divine intervention might save you now. But your legs won't move, stuck hopelessly in place.

Leon’s large hand wraps around your ankle, yanks you off the table and into his arms instead. You fight, of course you do, little fits and bursts of energy that die one after the other just as quick as the last. You’ve got those rheumy eyes that he hates to see, shiny and so, so sad. Those sweet eyes of yours seem to plead with him, as if beckoning him to remember your love. Why do you look at him like that? He loves you now, do you not know?

The knife in his hand nicks at the soft skin under your chin—the knife, the knife, the knife; he must’ve picked it up somewhere between the first struggle and this one—he truly doesn’t mean to, panics a little when he sees the pearl of blood bloat and dribble, but then it trails down the lines of your throat, pools in the cavern of your collar bone. Not enough just yet to leak any further.

God you’re beautiful, even like this. He really could love you forever. If only you let him.

“Leon, I don’t want to die.” Sobs blubber from your lips in desperate little fits.

“Stop saying that—” He grits. Desolate despair shakes you in his arms, and Leon’s grip on the knife tightens anxiously. 

You struggle fruitlessly, kick your legs at him and try to wrestle out of his grip. The horrifying realisation that you are going to die tonight sets in stone, and you plead in vain despite what little air you have left—waste your last breaths on words you have repeated so, so many times. Please, stop, no.

And you wish that instead, you could spend your last moments loving him. Your boy, your Leon. That maybe, if you had just tried harder, this wouldn’t have happened. If only you could reach out, through the cracks in his ribs, and hold his hellbound heart in your hands. Sew the beating flesh back together in hopes you can piece what is so broken. He is your Leon, after all. Yours, yours, yours.

So you reach for him, to hold, to kiss, to soothe, maybe. 

But like spooking an animal, you scare your killer. Worried he might lose you, you might make your escape, he presses the knife tighter. And fear itself is much like an animal, you flinch, and it happens fast. Faster than Leon anticipated it would. 

A slip of his hand and the knife sinks in with sickening grace, one clean motion and your skin parts like silk. Blood spills down your neck in shimmering, shining rivulets. A rushing river of crimson that trails along the notch of your collarbone, then spills lower, soaking into the fabric of your sweater. 

Your body slumps quickly and unceremoniously in his arms. Like the life drains out of you in a single breath. There’s so much blood, and Leon doesn’t even realise he’s dropped the knife until his feet slip on it while trying to hold you up. Horror blurs his vision, your blood stains his hands. It’s pungent, that copper, the tackiness of it, the way it clings to his fingers, hands, forearms.

And Leon can’t help but think of the rabbit. The way it had kicked and writhed fruitlessly, he had felt like a god holding its limp body in his hands as it trashed and kicked, as he made the decision to kill rather than keep. The way the first blood of his first kill had stained his hands like absolution, although, this seems to feel more like it.

Like the real absolution. Like the terrifying realisation of the truth. You are never coming back.

In Leon’s head, you had obliged to his plan easily. His little doe, sweet and naïve. You would’ve said yes, leaned into his touch like he was something to be worshiped. He would’ve died with you, wouldn’t have had to live in a world without you for more than a second. 

Romeo and Juliet.

But now he holds your darling body dead in his arms, and can’t figure out why he did it.

He wants to ask you to wake up, to look at him, but your head slumps forward every time he jostles your body. And when he pushes you up by the forehead, smearing your blood along your face, the skin at your neck tears further, rips so sickeningly he can hear it.

Leon cries. 

He tries to hold you together in his arms as he sinks to the floor. Your forehead rests against his shoulder, limp now, your blood seeping through his shirt until it clings to his skin like a layer of guilt. He doesn’t realise he’s crying until he starts gasping for breath, until the sobs shake his chest so violently that he can’t hold on to you, not with how hard his hands are trembling.

Your warmth leaves you faster than he thought it would. But still, impossibly, your chest glows beneath his hand. Like the sun still lives in you, tucked beneath your ribs, a stubborn ember of life that refuses to go dark, even as his world turns to shades grey around you.

He presses his hand flat to your sternum, like he could maybe feel it flicker.

And with what little strength he has left, he decides to finish what he started—while your heart is still sunlit, while your body is still warm with the memory of the girl you used to be.

The forest is silver in the early light, soft and damp from the night’s weeping. Morning stretches over the horizon in a slow yawn, brushing the treetops in bruised lilac and pale blue. The birds have begun to stir, distantly, hesitantly, like even the world has begun to mourn you.

Leon’s arms ache terribly, but it’s the kind of ache that is reminiscent of what he imagined Christ must’ve felt, bearing the cross. The knife rides silently at the small of his back once more, tucked into the waistband of his jeans. The underbrush snags at his trousers, scratches his ankles, but he doesn’t stumble, he knows where he’s going.

He doesn’t mind the way your limbs loll with the gentle sway of his gait, he is sure to hold you carefully, to not jostle you too much in your peace. His steps are careful and slow, as though he’s walking a sanctified path through the nave of a church.

The altar is only just up ahead.

He finds the clearing just as the sun splits the trees. Crocus blossoms bloom like bruises across the forest floor, lavender and cream, petals open in the dying moonlight. He steps carefully through them. Then, he kneels, and lays you down.

He fixes your clothes first. Smooths the hem of your sweater, buttons what he can. Then your hair—sticky and matted in places—he combs through it with his fingers, untangling, arranging, brushing it back behind your ears. There is blood on your face, flakes and smudges, copper stains across your cheeks. He leans in and kisses you softly. Your lips are cold, your skin already stiffening. But he kisses you anyway, and the dried blood cracks under the heat of his mouth, melts on his tongue like salt.

Your eyes have gone glassy, that beautiful color he once loved, now hollow, vapid, gone. He closes them softly, kisses each eyelid as goodbye but only for now. Only for now.

He lays beside you for a moment, his shoulder against yours, and closes his eyes. Pretends, pretends childishly, that this is just one of your mornings. Pretends you’ll wake, turn to him, smile softly, call to him in your saccharine voice, Leon? Leon? Wake up, you’d say, a gentle playful grin on your warm, soft lips.

They’ll find you like this, he thinks. Someone will see the door broken down, the blood on the floor, and follow the trail across the prairie and into the woods. They’ll find the two of you laid out like sculptures in the crocuses. He wants you to look like lovers. When someone finds you, they’ll say, look how gently he loved her. 

And it was love. Wasn’t it?

Even this—this ruin, this horror—came from love. The kind of love that is known to shake the bones and rip out reason. The kind of love that makes you do things, unspeakable things, because how else could you hold onto something so bright? So human?

He knows what he did, but there’s no forgiveness that comes with it. No redemption in it either. He thinks of your eyes—lovely now still, yet touched by death. The way they looked at him in those final moments, not with hatred, but with sorrow, with recognition. That’s what gutted him most, he thinks. Not that you feared him, but that you knew him, knew what he’d become, and mourned him before you died.

But still, still, still, you had loved him once. Before the fever took hold. Before he mistook obsession for undying devotion. You loved him then. And maybe, just maybe, that love still lingers in some soft, invisible corner of the world.

He is not naïve. He doesn’t think you’ll forgive him. But he hopes, god, he hopes, that wherever your soul went, it remembers him as he was. Not the monster who slit your throat, but the boy who learned how to love by watching you.

Maybe in the next life, he thinks. Maybe next time, it’ll be different. Maybe you’ll find him first. Maybe he’ll get to be yours again—just yours.

He takes your hand in his once more, squeezes your cold fingers tightly, and holds the knife in the other.

The serrated blade’s glistening edge finds the soft give of his throat. Leon’s chest rattles with the last breath of his.

He really did love y—

likes n reblogs r very much appreciated <3

[sweeterthanficstion]

Dude I've just read one of the best pieces of literature I've ever come across, and it's one of your many works, and I feel so empty after reading it like omg you hold SO much talent I need Almost Spring in hardback. I can't pit it into words how grateful i am for coming across ur account like that you, you absolute gem❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹

you are SO SWEET!! this is such a big compliment thank you so much <3

[sweeterthanficstion]

— almost spring || l.s.k

pairing: slasher(?)!leon kennedy x fem!reader

tags: set in 1974, DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT!! graphic depictions murder, suicide, death, and animal death. leon has a god complex (? that was an accident), themes of religious guilt, religious trauma/conflict, and references to parental abuse. heavy depictions of grief, themes of obsession and other typical horror topics. if i've missed anything, as always, please let me know!!

summary: Leon loves you too much to let you leave, but not enough to let you live. Or: In 1974, you fall in love with a boy. A boy who loves too hard and too viciously, and on the eve of your departure for college, realises he doesn't quite know how to live without you. Leon takes you to the old homestead where his grief has festered, under the pretense of one last memory together. What you don’t know is he’s spent weeks convincing himself that if he can’t have you forever, no one else should.

word count: 15.1k (IT GOT LONGER)

a/n: hi so firstly if you saw me upload this 2 days ago and take it down within five hours 1) no you didnt, and 2) i'm sorry 😭 i was really unhappy with the finished version of the fic at the time, it wasn't edited at the time and i love this piece too much to put it out into the world like that. AND HONESTLY! i wasn't even going to post it in the first place because (ik i promised you all more rockstar!leon but when have i ever stuck to my promises) i felt it was too self-indulgent for anyone else to enjoy anyway, but i have a few very good friends that convinced me otherwise. so. here we are.

i hope some of you like this, and if it's not your jam then i get it, please don't read it if any of those tags make you uneasy or feel obligated to just because i've posted it and you follow this blog. anyway, i hope the those of you that do fw this enjoy it :) slasher!leon is my baby, i love him dearly, i hope i did him justice and you love this fic as much as i do.

playlist ⭑ AO3 || back to the party ⭑ « future⭑ present ⭑ past (coming soon) »

There is something so very wrong with this town.

You’ve known it for much too long; there is a staleness to the air and a stagnation to the people. Nothing ever changes, and yet nothing has ever felt the same. There is no comfort in familiarity here, past the tree line and in the prairie — the whistle of the wind does not soothe, nor do the roads ever lead home.

Soon, the prairie will settle into its stiffness as it always does. Even in summer, this ghost town remains cold and lifeless, a carcass of a place that you're not sure was ever alive to begin with. Yet where it’d usually bother you, you don’t find you mind so much this year, because by spring you’ll be gone.

Away from here and into the city; you will go to university, you will study, you will make so much money you will never have to worry about money again. You will leave this lonely prairie town behind, and you won't stop until you’ve driven a thousand miles and a mile and have reached the end of the world. Then, you think, you will be happy.

But for now you endure the biting cold and the terrible people, finish up your final semester of school, and wonder endlessly what the city must be like. You know it bustles with a life you yearn to love. Maybe you will find a home in an apartment on a busy street above a record store, suffocated between two more buildings, so cramped yet you do not mind because the air is thick with life and opportunity. You will crack open your bedroom window each morning and climb onto the fire escape. There, you will let the warmth of a morning coffee seep through ceramic and into your cold hands and you will smile as the sun rises to greet you.

You can’t wait, you count the days until summer on your fingers. You never did like autumn or winter anyway—not when this town already feels like shades of blue all year round.

The stupor you’ve let yourself fall into is shattered when there come two knocks at your window. 

Leon walks into your life time and time again as if on stage cue, as if he’s practised being in your life infinitesimally. Through your window, he stumbles in like Romeo, a smile on his face and an autumn night's blush on his cheeks.

“God, Leon, you scared me,” you huff, the cold draft he lets in makes gooseflesh dot across your arms, makes you pout. You’re not really upset, but you feel like you should be. You’ve told him a hundred times over that he shouldn’t visit you unprompted through your window at ungodly hours of the night, lest your mother find out.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Leon placates you with a kiss to your temple, and then one to the corner of your mouth that tugs a reluctant smile from you.

He isn’t really sorry—no, not when it means he can kiss you like this. He thinks all the chiding he gets from you is worth it as long as his lips stay on yours.

Leon never did anticipate falling in love. It wasn’t a part of his plan. Then again, he never really had one. After the death of his parents, the world had dulled to something akin to a bitter grey, and he’d begun to see his life through a screen of black and white.

That was until you. You, sweet as summer rain and spring sunshine. You, with a heart that beats as loud as his. You came into his life and suddenly the world seemed brighter even despite the noose this prairie town hung around his neck.

Leon, who hasn’t believed in anything since he was twelve, kneeling in church pews, now finds that the only thing he believes in is the way your mouth shapes his name.

You give him hope—and that terrifies him. Hope is bright, and it burns his wrists like stigmata every time he reaches out for it. You are dangerous, in the way that only someone who makes him want can be. You make him want things he has no business wanting, things he never allowed himself to need.

Your hands are a vice that hold a power over him that you don’t even know of. But if Leon is to suffer under anyone's hand, he thinks, it might as well be yours.

You tap his chest once, twice, thrice. Pull him back to the now with such softness it chokes him. He worries he might crush you under his hold.

“Why’d you sneak through the window?” You ask suddenly, question catching him off guard, but the gentleness to your voice keeps him at ease.

“Well, I missed you.” Leon explains easily.

“I have a phone you can call me on, you know.”

“Yes. But I like seeing you.” He leaves unsaid the truth that drives him; he wants to ensure you’re real. Flesh and blood and tangible under his fingertips.

Because as of late, nothing feels real anymore.

Leon thinks the homestead must finally be getting to him. No, he doesn’t live there—thank God. But he goes there once a week for a reason he can’t explain anymore. At first, it was because the place was quiet, somewhere to quell the noise of his head for a few hours, and in his half-hearted hubris, he stayed. But now he’s convinced the darkness in those hallways has crept into his mind. Like a fish on a line, he is hopelessly tethered there.

The homestead—like an accumulation of past horrors that have nowhere left to go—must feed on sadness, as all evil things do. The house breathes in his despair as if it is a living being, twists his thoughts until the line between his own mind and the evil that lurks there blurs. He wonders if perhaps it chose him—if it knows his heart better than he does, if it sees the rot taking root deep inside.

But then there you are again, his sweet summer rain, his spring sunshine. He forgets about the cold in the heat of your embrace. You are a stagnation he is grateful for, an anchor, his temporary reprieve from the vigour that is his mind. The world will come and go, he knows, this town won’t change, but that’s fine—he will memorise the cadence of your heartbeat beneath your skin, and when that is not enough he will kiss you as he craves you and love you until there is nothing left of himself to give.

He knows he should tell you this, knows he should, but then you look at him—a gaze as soft as warm candlelight in the dark, and reach for him, like you don’t know what he’s capable of.

"You’re quiet," you say, fingers brushing his wrist, curling there like an anchor, like you could tether him to you instead.

"Just thinking," he murmurs, shaking his head.

You sigh, shifting back on the bed, patting the space beside you. Stay. You don’t say it aloud, but he hears it all the same.

Leon hesitates. Just for a moment. Then, with an exhale, he climbs in next to you.

You fit against him like you were made to be, your head tucked perfectly under his chin, one arm slung lithely across his waist. He is a furnace against you, all heat and warmth, and although he snuck in from the cold, it seems like his heart has been radiating warmth all along.

Leon wonders if it’s because of you.

Now, he counts your breaths, feels them feather out against his throat, the soft rise and fall of your chest against his ribs. 

And when you shift to look at him, your chin lifting ever so, his heart stumbles. Your fingers reach up, tracing the sharp edge of his jaw, then trailing lower, down the line of his throat, pressing softly against his pulse.

He knows you feel it, the boyish way it races.

You hum, closing your eyes again, pressing close, smiling sleepily against his skin.

Leon watches you for a long time after that.

He tells himself he will let you go once you’ve fallen asleep. He will climb back out your window and let the dusk swallow him up in its slow fade from ink to indigo.

But yet you are warm against him, your heart a steady lull, alive and breathing. 

So instead, he stays. 

The wind ripples through the prairie grass like it might be alive, shushing against itself as it bends and sways. The damp earth gives softly under Leon’s boots as he tracks his own footsteps down the path he knows so well.

He moves without thinking, without deciding, the path is muscle memory to him. He ducks beneath the broken split-rail fence, fingers grazing its surface. Years of sun and wandering hands have worn it down, soft weather-worn wood that no longer splinters. 

The old house sits in the distance like a bad omen, its roof sagging in, paint peeling under years of heat and snow and rain. Its windows are like hollow eyes, watching, watching, watching. Always watching.

It is empty here, it has been empty for a long time.

The trap is set just beyond the homestead around the back, nestled deep into the brush. Leon checks it the way he always does, though he’s still not sure why. There is no need for him to do so anymore, no one is waiting for him to bring something home. No one will scold him for forgetting, or praise him for getting it right.

Maybe, he thinks, he set it to see if he could.

Maybe just to see if something would stumble into it, to see if the universe would put something small and helpless in his hands.

Maybe so he could prove to himself that he wouldn’t do it despite himself. 

His father’s voice still haunts the edges of his memory, changed and softened by time, and the longing for a love greater than he was given. A summer afternoon, tall grass brushing his baby-soft calves. A gentle hand, with years of experience etched into the calluses, guiding his own. 

See? His father’s voice echoes. Like this. It’s quick. They won’t feel a thing. A clean kill is a kind kill.

Leon doesn’t remember if he believed that.

So still, he isn’t sure why he returns each day to check the trap, but he does it anyway, yesterday it was empty, and the day before that too. He had exhaled relief both times. 

Yet today—

The rabbit is trembling.

It is small and wild, barely more than a handful in size, yet shaking and thrashing with the force of something twice its size. It’s all matted fur and wide, scared eyes. Its hind legs twist unnaturally in the wire, kicking like maybe, just maybe, if it tried hard enough it could get away.

The wind whistles through the tree line with the truth of its being; It wants to live.

And Leon knows, knows he could let it go. He could pry the trap open, let it bolt back past the underbrush, pretend none of this ever happened—that he didn’t set the trap, that he never saw it here at all, that he wouldn’t have to do what he does next.

His hands are gentle despite their intention. They press into the rabbit’s soft side, he can feel the rapid, terrified stutter of its heart, the warm way its flesh sings beneath his palms.

Leon’s mouth goes dry.

The knife feels heavier than it should when he pulls it from his back pocket, the weight of it strangely unfamiliar despite the way it’s molded to his hold. 

The rabbit’s fragile body spasms against him, claws like knives of their own scrape at his wrist, sharp pinpricks against his skin, weak but insistent all the same. He can hear its breath, sharp and fast, the pitiful, wheezing struggle of it.

It’s suffering.

Quick, it has to be quick. A clean kill is a kind kill.

There’s a sharp wet sound, the parting of skin, sinew, muscle.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

But still, the blood comes fast.

It spills in a hot rush over Leon’s fingers, thick and slick it seeps into the creases of his palms, painting his knuckles in something dark and final. It soaks into the cuff of his sleeve, and the sharp copper stench of it is what makes his stomach turn.

Something ugly coils in his gut. He wants to call it nausea, but it isn’t—not entirely. There is something else, something worse, something hotter that curls low in his ribs, twisting there, sick and shameful.

Satisfaction.

The realisation makes his skin break out in gooseflesh.

Leon shoves back, scrambling to his feet so fast he goes lightheaded, stumbling to regain his balance. His breath comes sharp, his fingers shaking where they hover in front of him, bloodied and trembling. His heart pounds, hammering a violent rhythm against his ribs.

He told himself he wouldn’t do it, but the truth stains him anyway.

The blood is gone by morning but it still lingers on Leon’s hands like a phantom second skin. 

He had scrubbed them raw, yet no matter how long he had tried for, he could still smell the copper, still see the red. He rubs his hands together absently even now, like he can still feel the slick between his fingers, he flexes his hands like the blood might come back if he catches the light just right. 

But then your voice comes, your gentle talking. Something soft that drones on in its mundanity that cuts right through the thick fog in his head.

He is sitting on the edge of your bed when he turns his head towards you, slow, like waking up from a dream, and for a second all he sees is light.

Sunlight filters in through thin lace curtains, catching in the strands of your hair. It spills liquid gold over your shoulders, and the fine edges of your form, seeps into where he can make out the curve of your waist through the thin cotton of your dress, the swell of your hips and the lines of your thighs. Dust swirls in the glow around you, disturbed only by your movement as you tiptoe around your room, drifting from one thing to the next with a sort of absentminded grace Leon is sure he’s only ever seen you possess.

He thinks you look like an angel—wings of spun sunlight, gilding at the edges, a halo to match. The pretty cadence of your voice like angelsong that falls from gentle lips. He figures then, that you, bathed in heaven-yellow light, just might have been sent to save him. The heat of you is enough to keep him warm, stave off the cold that splits open inside him.

Your voice carries on, talking between verses, words scattered like leaves in autumn breeze, thoughts half-formed and entirely weightless.

He figures you don’t expect him to answer, not really, not with the way you ask a question and move onto the next. He nods where is needed and smiles where he should, and it seems to be enough for you. Leon finds a comfort in it, the way you let yourself exist near him so easily, like he belongs here with you. 

And he does. That he is sure of.

You look untouched by his morning, by the things you don’t yet know he’s done. You smell like warm cotton, like candle wax and old wooden pews, like the incense that used to curl up toward the vaulted ceiling of the church. Like Sunday. 

Your voice is light as you pluck up a book from your desk. “I wanted to bring you with me to service this morning. But you never showed.”

Leon says nothing.

You glance at him, then back at the book. “You’d have liked the sermon, I think.”

He doesn’t tell you where he was. He doesn’t tell you he didn’t show because he had woken before dawnfire slanted over the horizon, before the church bells rang, before the town stirred to life. He doesn’t tell you that while you had buttoned yourself into something light and lovely, Leon had spilt his first blood.

"Have you read this one?" You ask, flashing the battered cover of the book in your hand.

He barely sees it. Shakes his head.

You hum, tossing it onto the bed beside him. "You should.”

He won’t. But he won’t tell you that either.

You move again, the scent of you trailing in your wake. You step lightly over a pair of old boots left haphazardly by your door, bare feet on creaking wood, unbothered by the silence he’s wrapped himself in.

There is something about you. Something radiant, something unbearable. Something that aches to be looked upon.

He glances away, jaw tight.

You don’t know. You don’t know.

He should feel ashamed. He does.

“Leon?”

His eyes snap up.

You’re watching him now, head tilted slightly like a naïve fawn, brow creased just enough to let him know you see something fraying, something untangling.

He doesn’t say anything.

You step closer, and it’s an unfortunate instinct—something old and hardwired—that makes him tense.

"You’re quiet," you say.

Leon exhales through his nose, like you amuse him. "You always say that."

You huff a quiet laugh. "I know. But you’re quiet in a different way."

Again, he doesn’t answer.

You kneel in front of him, peering up at him like you’re trying to see inside. Like if you could, you’d splinter apart his chest and peek between the looms of his ribs to find his heart, like you might find love there, and not this sickness in its place instead.

It makes him ill, the way you look at him.

Oh, you don't know. You don't know what he is.

“Are you okay?”

Push

“Yeah.” He insists.

"Are you sure?"

Push.

"I said yeah."

"You don’t seem okay—"

Push.

"Will you drop it?"

It comes out sharp, harsher than he intends, and you still instantly. Deer caught in headlights.

Leon doesn’t raise his voice, not to you, never to you. To you, he is gentle hands that hold, soft lips that kiss, a kind heart that loves. You have never known him as anything other than that.

You blink up at him, lips parting slightly, your breath caught somewhere in the cavern of your throat.

Leon swallows. Regret is instant and hits like a fist, it makes his stomach cave in. But still it doesn’t cool the flicker of anger, the frustration. It still curls hot in his gut, climbing its way up his throat like a vice.

“You’re being mean.”

It shouldn’t gut him the way it does.

You don’t say cruel, or violent, or dangerous. Just mean. Like he’s a child, a boy caught shoving another in the schoolyard. Like he hasn’t done things worse than this, than raise his voice.

It is like an awful stinging brand to the marrow of his bone. A verdict. A sentence.

Mean.

Not the thing he fears he is, not the monster he’s convinced himself lives beneath his skin. 

His mouth opens, but nothing comes. No apology, no defense.

He needs to leave, needs to wrench himself from this moment before it swallows him whole, before he drowns in the guilt of it.

Leon stands abruptly, and you flinch. It’s slight—just the smallest flicker of movement—but he catches it, and the sight of it nearly drives him to his knees.

He shouldn’t be here, not when he’s still raw with anger, with whatever awful thing is stirring inside him, with the taste of it thick like molasses on his tongue.

So he doesn’t look at you when he goes, doesn’t wait for you to tell him to stay, doesn’t let himself want to.

He kills a man that night.

Leon didn’t mean to—truly, really, he didn’t. He can’t even remember the moment it happened.

The night had been old, an hour close to dusk that made him restless. Leon finds himself at the homestead once more, circling the bones of a place that no longer feels like home.

He had been leaving when it happened, the weight of his knife heavy in his hand as he tossed it, caught it, tossed it, caught it, tossed it, caught it. 

There was no rabbit, but that was a good thing, he thought. A sigh of relief.

And yet, despite it, there had been a man.

Leon didn’t recognize him. Not from town, but maybe passing through, maybe someone old or someone new. It didn’t matter, not then.

The night had been cold and blue, and there was no gilding light of yours to keep him warm. And Leon; he had ached terribly for something, anything, that made him feel as alive as you did.

So he had wielded his knife.

And the moment it happened, there had been nothing. No divine intervention, no reckoning from above. The sky remained starless, silent, watching but not bearing witness. He remembers the sharp crack of bone, the whisper of a breath spilling from the man’s lips. 

Then, startling silence.

It had been so quick. The knife had driven up into his chest, right through the middle. A clean kill is a kind kill, after all.

A sharp breath had hitched in Leon’s throat then, something close to horror, maybe regret. It had come and gone in an instant, but it had been there, lodging itself in the back of his mind. And now, standing over the body of a man he does not know, hands tacky with already cooling blood, he should feel something more.

Shouldn’t he?

But still the sky does not split open, and the earth does not swallow him whole. He is not cast down, nor is he lifted up.

Instead, he feels nothing at all.

The man had barely struggled, hadn’t screamed nor kicked. It hadn’t wanted to survive the same way the rabbit had.

Leon tells himself that should make it better. He shouldn’t feel guilty if the man had no fight in him. If it had been quick. If it had been easy. Still, something churns deep in his stomach, a sickness that lingers behind his ribs. It gnaws at him as he kneels down, as his fingers skim across cooling flesh.

No. His mind speaks with a finality he cannot defer, if he stops now, he’ll feel it. The ache, the emptiness, the unbearable weight of knowing what he’s done.

So he keeps going.

And when the body is found by the old railway tracks the next morning, it is dismembered. Skin peeled away, ribbons of flesh left in its wake.

First the sheriff is called. Then the detectives. Then the priest.

Because this is the sort of town that still believes in damnation, in reckoning. That still believes a man’s soul can be unspooled from his body if his sins are dark enough, if his death is brutal enough, if his memory means enough.

The town hums with the news of it, a low, uneasy sort of murmur curling through the streets like a thick fog. Leon has heard the same thing all day long.

Did you hear? A man by the railway this morning. A single knife wound, right between the ribs. Someone must’ve known what they were doing.

But Leon didn't know. He didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t. He tells himself that over and under and over again until it is the only thing he knows.

He tries to ignore how his breath catches in his throat when he hears the whispers, tries not to flinch when his boss leans over the register and mutters, It’s just not right.

Instead, he stares at the rows of screws and bolts and lockboxes he’s organised and reorganised all morning, every object neat and harmless in its purpose, and tells himself again:

It wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t.

What Leon feels isn’t fear. No, it’s not quite that, but something close to it.

Because if there was no judgment the night it happened, will it come later? Will it slip through the cracks, find him in the dark?

Leon hadn’t even been rostered today, but he had insisted. Said he didn’t mind, needed the extra hours, said he needed the money.

The truth was, he needed noise. Needed the consistent, reliable clang of metal and the hum of fluorescents, needed to feel the ache in his arms from hauling boxes of nails and guttering and rat traps.

He figured the busy come-and-go of customers might be enough to keep his mind from wandering. But it isn’t.

Not when every passing face is a little too curious, a little too eager. Not when the newspaper sits folded by the register, inked with a headline he doesn’t dare read. Not when the wrench in his hand feels a little too much like the weight of his knife.

The bell chimes.

There you are.

Sunlight at your back, one hand curled around the strap of your bag. Your presence is enough to ease the ache in his chest like a balm, a smile like the sun on your lips. 

You lean up against the counter and for a minute you look like a timid animal—smiling still, but fiddling with the strap of your bag, like you’re not sure whether to stay or go, like coming here was a decision you second-guessed the whole way over. Leon hopes you’ll stay. Of course, you do.

“Hey, handsome,” you greet like always, but the words come out funny, like they don’t quite fit the shape of your mouth. You clear your throat and try again, “I— uhm, m’sorry about last night.”

Leon’s mind lurches. A hop, a skip, and a sharp turn into the white hot memory of last night—blood, copper-bright under moonlight, a gasping mouth, wide open eyes. You know, you know, you know.

“I didn’t mean to push you so hard,” come your next words. And each one comes back in pieces, a slow realisation, like waking up from a dream. Oh, he thinks. Not that.

He’d half forgotten how he’d treated you the night before, all sharp edges and words that were meant to cut. He’d forgotten the way you’d wavered. You’d just tried to help, his sweet girl. He’d worried you, and then, because that wasn’t enough, he’d hurt you some more. 

Mean, you’d called him.

The guilt that had been sitting heavy in his stomach shifts, grows roots, spreads like ivy through his ribs. He stays silent for a beat too long, and your lips—your pretty, angel lips—pull into the softest frown.

And guilt is a tidal wave that pulls him under.

“I didn’t— no, I’m sorry.” He says, ducks his head into your line of sight, enough to give you a half smile, enough to tick your lips back up just a little. The relief that comes with seeing it is instant. “I’m sorry, alright? Was my fault, I’ve been a bad boyfriend.”

“S’okay,” you beam easily, like that’s all it took. A barely-there apology, no penance required, and your heart is in his hands once more. Yours to give and his to hold.

It’s okay, you say. It makes Leon’s stomach curdle, because he thinks, if he pressed a knife to your throat, you would only look at him like this—soft, bright, sun-warmed—and show him where to cut.

The thought is sudden and unwelcome and it makes his insides turn out, makes him sick and sour. He couldn’t hurt you, wouldn’t, won’t. 

You’re his summer rain, spring sunshine.

Easily, you reach into your bag, unaware of the thoughts in his head, and slide that same book from the day before across the counter. 

“I think you’d like it,” you insist, and Leon doesn’t have the heart to deny you any longer.

He takes the book, pages curling and spine breaking, and flips through it. “I’ll read it.”

You beam again. The sun.

Leon doesn’t really read the book. 

He tries, he really does, but it’s hard to focus on the words when the only thing on his mind is how you’d kissed him earlier that night.

He’d climbed through your window like he always does, and you’d pulled him into a desperate kiss the second he’d stumbled into your room. He hadn’t had a choice but to melt into your arms. It had felt like coming home.

He presses two fingers to his lips, still warm from where you’d kissed and sucked and bitten, giggled into his mouth so bright and easy. He feels his pulse thrum beneath his touch and licks his lips to savour the taste.

The book in his lap is half-forgotten. Its cover is a little torn, pages aged and dog-eared. It feels like a piece of you he is privileged enough to carry in his hands.

Romeo and Juliet.

He finds it ironic, despite everything, that you wanted him to read it so badly. His eyes dart over inky text, words that swim and shift like the river that bends behind the homestead, a gentle rush of water that serves as a lulling ambience to his solitude.

He finds a passage, one that you’ve underlined in red pen.

These violent delights have violent ends, it reads. A strange sort of line for you to find interest in, he thinks. He wonders why you picked it, what went through your mind when you highlighted it.

His eyes skim back up the page, trying to garner some context.

Love-devouring death do what he dare—

It is enough I may but call her mine

A hollow sort of breath escapes him, because all Leon can think about is you. Your gaze, eversoft and unwavering, like you see his jagged edges and want him all the same.

And it is true, he thinks, it is enough he may but call you his. 

The thought creeps in once more, his knife, your throat, those eyes he loves that would shimmer with tears. 

He thinks about you beneath him, if you’d dig half moons into his shoulders with your nails, if you’d let him drag the knife over your chest and press the blade to your sternum. How you’d gasp so prettily. He wonders what your blood would look like, taste like. It’s thrilling in it’s sickness, lovely in its ghastliness. 

He snaps out of his thoughts in time with the sweet call of birdsong. 

A bluebird perched in a tree across the river, awake at an hour like this. 

He snaps the book shut and moves to make his way home, dusting dirt off his pants and walking his way down the bend of the river back towards the homestead.

The mud beneath his boots squishes with each step, reeds parting as the sun rises to greet the sleepy town like always, shades of pink and purple bleeding into a midnight sky.

It is not until Leon nears the tree line once more, that he hears another strange sound. A voice, gentle and soft, laughing prettily from somewhere deeper in the brush.

Leon finds himself following the curious sound back down the riverbend, the sound of laughter, light and bell-like, carries through the trees like a silver mist, weaves through the reeds and cattails. 

He stills at what he sees.

Further down the creek, where the water teeters off and runs clear through the rocks, a figure stands with their back to him. A girl, he realises. Young, bright, wearing a dark dress, she stands knee-deep in the water, her arms crossed against the chill, head tilted back as she watches a boy shrug on his shirt, press a gentle kiss to her forehead, and disappear back into the brush, leaving her alone in the shallows.

Leon should leave. 

He should turn around and walk away, pretend he never saw her, pretend he wasn’t here at all.

But then she hums, a soft, gentle lilt, and something in his gut pulls.

He doesn’t remember wading in. He doesn’t remember the moment she notices him—just that she turns, eyes going wide in the dark, lips parting like she might speak his name.

His name.

For a split second, the world narrows to the space between them. To her breath, sharp and hitched in her throat. To the way she sways slightly in the water, caught between fear and recognition. She isn’t a stranger, is she?

The silence between them feels like a choice.

Then, the choice is gone.

He moves before he can think. A hand to the throat, a push, the sudden burst of movement as she fights. She is stronger than he expects.

The river churns around them, frothing and thrashing as though it too wants to resist him. She fights the way people pray. Desperately, recklessly, full of blind and furious belief. Her hands scrabble at his wrists, her legs kick up mud from the riverbed, silt blooms dark in the water like ink spilled across a page.

Her mouth breaks the surface for just a second, one precious second, and the sound that leaves her is something raw, something torn from deep inside her ribs. A plea, a sob, a name, maybe. His. God’s. Does it matter?

Leon’s breathing is sharp, his pulse quick and importunate in his ears. Her hair floats like ribbons around them, tangling between his fingers, dragging across his arms. His grip tightens, his body locks against the current, against her twisting, bucking frame.

She looks a bit like you, Leon thinks. Hair the colour of yours, eyes that cry the same way yours do.

This is the closest he will ever get to killing you.

He knows this, swallows hard, and tightens his grip. Finality is the way he holds her under.

He wonders if this is what Othello felt, pressing a pillow to Desdemona’s lips. If this is what God felt, when he sent the flood.

It takes longer than he thought it would.

Long enough for him to feel the strength ebb from her body in slow, rattling increments—until the fight is just... gone. Her hands fall away from his wrists, her body goes slack and the water cradles her gently, like a lover.

And still, he cannot let her go.

His breath comes in uneven, fitful bursts now. His hands are shaking, his hands are shaking.

He watches the last breath slip from her lips in a plume of air bubbles, scattering like stars on the surface of the water. The last thing she gives to the world.

Then, finally, he releases her.

He staggers back, the bank uneven beneath his feet. He watches her body now, drifting softly down the current, her hair fans out like a halo against the pale shimmer of the river. His hands are still shaking near-hysteric now, still caught up in the phantom of her struggle, in the memory of her weight underneath him.

Something in his gut twists.

This should be enough.

He tells himself that, standing there, breath sharp and uneven, blood roaring through his skull. This should be enough. This should quiet it. This should—

He swallows thickly.

He won’t know until he sees you again.

It’s not until he’s made his way back to your window, climbing inside, finding you curled up in the sheets, warm and still and alive, that he realises he’s still shaking. He winds his arms around you, pressing his face to your shoulder, inhaling deep, trying to sink into the scent of you, the presence of you, the proof of you.

By the time the boy returns to the riverbed, the creek is empty, the water is still, and the girl in the dark dress is nowhere to be found.

The church suffocates you. 

Stained glass windows cast slanted beams of bleeding gold and bruised violet across the pews, coloring the clamour of mourners in fractured, dancing lights. The air is stifled with too many bodies pressed into too-small a space, with incense and thick heat, and the cloying smell of day-old lilies that have since grown soft.

You sit in the second row, hands white-knuckle-tight stitched together in your lap. Despite not having spoken for days, there is a rawness that scratches your throat from the inside out, like you’ve swallowed something sharp and it’s lodged itself there, unable to go down. Maybe it is the weight of your grief, your regret, your guilt.

Someone speaks at the podium, a voice that barely cuts through the static hum that reverberates around your skull. Muddy words drift from there to here.

She was kind, she was bright, she was loved.

You hear every word, yet each one passes through you like wind through hollow bones.

It doesn’t quite feel real when they lower her into the earth. You try to remember the last thing she said to you, but cruelly, all your memories blur at the edges, overtaken by a litany of others—her bloated corpse washed up on the riverbed, her hair tangled between the reeds, the outline of her dress like dark wings fluttering beneath the water. 

You picture her gasping for air.

The thought guts you clean in half, and your tears threaten to spill before you can blink them away. 

Leon’s hand finds yours.

His fingers press into your palm, grounding and warm, as if he’s trying to anchor you to something beyond the weight of your grief. You squeeze back, hard enough to bruise.

And Leon lets you—lets you hurt him, lets you crush his hand in yours like the pain might balance out the weight of his guilt. He welcomes it, craves it, even. Because this grief of yours, this need, your trembling trust, it’s the closest he knows he’ll ever come to redemption.

Because he knows the weight of the dirt being shoveled onto the coffin. Knows what it’s like to hold someone under, to feel the last of their fight fade out through their limbs, he knows the exact hue her lips turned when the light went out behind her eyes.

And now he stands beside you, the architect of your mourning, and lets you draw comfort from the same hands that stilled her heartbeat.

He wants to be good. For you. Just for you.

He watches your grief manifest while something sharp turns in his stomach. He hates this part. Not the killing. That, he has learnt to live with. But this aftermath, you, and the raw pain in your soft cries, it makes him sick.

And it sickens him even more, how much he loves the blind, aching way you cling to him. As if you still believe his hands could do nothing but hold. That he would never hurt you. As if you don’t feel her ghost breathing between you.

Autumn gives way to blistering winter, winter on the cusp of newfound spring. The town exhales, slowly, warily, like it’s forgotten how to breathe without bracing for bad news. The snow that had settled itself over everything—over gravestones and shuttered windows, over street signs and the lonely traffic light in town—begins to thaw.

And with it, Leon watches you come undone by inches. A thousand little deaths, none of them final. He thought by now your aching heart would’ve healed, warmed with the coming seasons. But instead, he watches you lose pieces of yourself day by day. You stop painting your nails, you don’t come into town anymore, don’t visit him at work like you used to. 

When he comes by your window some nights, with not another sound to fill the silence, he hears you crying. And he can’t bear himself to climb in, wouldn’t know how to offer a semblance of the solace you deserved. 

Leon feels like he’s losing you. 

And it’s furious, the hopeless way he runs his mind in circles. There is no more bloodshed because he sees no reason, no more bodies to be found because Leon’s knife has been tucked neatly into the drawer next to his bed ever since the funeral service. 

Because what does it matter, if you don’t look at him like you used to? If your laughter doesn’t chase itself down the hallway of his heart anymore?

What use is ruin without worship? Worship without ruin?

But still, violence has since become as familiar an organ as his heart is to his body. 

On restless nights, he dreams of you dead. With your face turned heavenward, just like hers had been, your eyes wide open, but the light gone out. And he wakes gasping, as if the world could not possibly go on without you in it. As if the very thought of you leaving him in this cold, dark, world would kill him too. 

It reminds him of the deer.

He must’ve been eight, maybe nine. The sun was low in the sky, his father was tired. He’d hit a doe just outside of town, off the road, far enough away that nobody would care enough to clean her carcass off the road. 

She didn’t die right away, she’d staggered, then crumpled right there beside the road, steam rising and curling from her body.

And every day after, they passed her in the truck on the way home.

The first day, she looked peaceful, her legs tucked up beneath her like she might stir if the wind coaxed her kindly enough. The second day, her eyes were gone—eaten out, maybe, or just caved in by time. By the third day, her ribs peeked through the belly, white as the moon. And on the fourth, there was nothing but a melted smear of a black shape left behind.

Fur turned to hide. Hide to sinew. Sinew to rot.

He thinks of that deer when he dreams of you.

 And each time, you rot faster, fade sooner. The curve of your mouth becomes less familiar, the slope of your nose wrong, wrong, wrong. You morph and twist and change, until the shape of you is something unrecognisable, nothing more than an impression printed into the backs of his eyelids.

So, in the wake of what he knows, Leon finds himself by your window again. You’ve left it open like always, but he still finds himself knocking. Three gentle raps.

“Come in,” you say quietly, welcoming him into your dying warmth. You’re curled on your bed in the half-light, the bulb in your bedside lamp sputtering with the soft whine of something close to death.

“Hi, sunshine.”

You glance up, tired-eyed, a little smile tugging at the corner of your mouth. That nickname again—ridiculous and ill-fitting now, like summer clothes in winter.

“I think your lamp’s giving up,” he adds, stepping inside. “Probably tired of listening to the same sad music on repeat.”

For weeks now, your room has been a graveyard of bitter melody, he’s sure you’ve worn out every record you own. You’ve played Dust by Fleetwood Mac until the grooves wore thin, spun Blue until Joni Mitchell’s voice felt stitched into your ribs.

You roll your eyes despite him, but it’s fond all the same. “So fix it.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He moves toward the nightstand with mock solemnity, fiddling with the bulb as if it requires real effort. It flickers back to life with a reluctant hum.

He turns to you then, the golden glow casts him in sepia. He looks like a photograph you’d keep in a locket close to your heart.

“Better?” he asks.

You nod. “Yeah. Thanks.”

He kneels beside your bed, brushing the hair from your eyes with the backs of his fingers. Then, he hooks one finger beneath your quilt, pulls the blanket down just to kiss your chapped lips softly.

You don’t feel like you deserve his kindness or the warmth he offers you so freely, like you should live in the shape of your sadness forever. But you let him anyway because grief makes you greedy. He kisses your cheeks next, one then the other, your nose last. His hands cradle the sides of your face, rough palms that have never felt softer to you.

He loves you, this you know. And you will hold onto it selfishly if it is all you have left.

“I hate seeing you like this,” he admits softly. The words are like a sinking stone in your chest. For a breath, you feel ashamed—like your sorrow is a burden he’s been forced to carry. He’s hurting too, you’ve known that for a while. The heaviness in his eyes and the weight of his smile speaks a thousand unsaid words.

But what exactly he’s mourning, you do not know. You wish you could fix it anyway.

“I know,” you murmur softly at last. “I’m sorry.”

Leon studies you quietly, tender blue looks at you like you're precious and breakable all at once. He kisses you softly once more, draws your hands from beneath the blanket and holds them in his own, lacing your fingers together like they belong together.

“Come with me,” He says, nodding towards the window, the rush of dying winter air billowing the lace curtains.

“Where to?” You ask, confusion lacing your brows together.

“Does it matter?”

It doesn’t. So you follow him. Sneak out your window like Rapunzel. Leon helps you down, your bare feet skid across the shingles, arms windmilling once before you tumble—soft and graceless—into the sleeping brush below.

He braces for the worst, and yet you laugh. Something soft and sudden it startles the birds from the trees, and it’s like colour floods his being.

He takes you somewhere secret, a quiet hush-hush between gentle laughter the whole way through the thinning woods. 

The trees are not dense where you live on the outskirts of the prairie, they stretch like spindles toward the sky, bark peeled back by time and winter wind. They do not grow thick here, only tall—long, reaching limbs that vanish into the mist. As a child, you once imagined climbing them straight into heaven, fingers grazing the stars.

You trudge shoulder to shoulder. The snow has thinned, melted to a slippery slush along the roots and rocks. You spot the first crocus bloom peeking out beside a fallen log, delicate and purple as a bruise. The woods are waking. And so, maybe, are you.

The radio tower rises suddenly, summoned from the earth itself.

It stands at the highest point of the valley. Its metal skeleton weathered and rusted, cables like veins strung between its limbs. Once, it must have pulsed with light and signal, voices skipping across the hills in Morse-coded static.

He takes your hand and leads you up the spindly ladder, each rung groans under your weight, as your breath fogs in the air. Higher and higher you go, until the town becomes a scatter of lights beneath you, until the forest is a patchwork, stitched into the earth like a quilt.

And finally, when you get to the top, tearing your skirt free from where it catches on loose wire, you feel alive for the first time in a long time. 

The wind cleaves straight through you, sharp and unforgiving, but you like the way it bites your skin, whips your hair about in all sorts of directions.

“This is magic,” you say, words coated in disbelief. The entire town looks like a tiny playset from up here.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” You hear him before you feel him, the brush of his shoulder against yours as he leans against the rusted railing with you. The tower creaks gently under your shared weight.

You just stand there, taking it all in. Your breath puffs in the chill, slow and even. He hasn’t seen you breathe like this in months.

“I can’t wait to leave this town,” you say suddenly, voice soft, threaded with something close to wonder.

Leon doesn’t move. Just watches the way your eyes drift toward the horizon, like you’re already halfway gone.

“I used to think I’d miss it,” you go on, “but now… I don’t know. I think I’m ready for college. To move on, maybe. To start something new.” You laugh, quiet and a little sheepish, turn to look at him. “Isn’t that awful? I feel like I’m supposed to stay here. Be sad forever.”

He opens his mouth. Closes it again.

“It’s not awful,” he says, but the words taste like a bitter lie. It is awful. It’s so horribly awful that you’d ever imagine a life for yourself in which he doesn't exist.

New city, new people. Where does he fit in that picture?

A strange kind of panic stirs in his chest. You, leaving. You, gone. He can’t bear the thought of a world without you. One where he doesn’t get to hear you laugh, see you smile. One where you don’t follow him around or ask him pointless questions just to hear his voice.

He imagines your bedroom window with the light switched off.

The thought unmoors him. 

He can see the homestead from here, a darkness exuding so potently the shadows flicker in the corner of his eye all the way from up here. 

He glances back at you, and thinks consciously, for the first time in a while, how easy it’d be to keep you. 

The voice in his head is gentle. Persuasive. It sounds a little like love.

So he makes his decision, albeit painstakingly, but with the sort of deliberation that feels, in some twisted corner of his mind, like mercy.

He tries not to. For weeks, he tries. Tries to reason with himself, the way one might try to wean a wild dog off affection. 

His knife spills new blood. A rabbit. A dog. Something dumb and soft and unknowing, something helpless with a heartbeat loud enough to quell the sickening desire. He tries, desperately, to let you go in ways that might make it easier. Like if he staves the copper-in-his-mouth urge off for long enough, it’ll suffice.

But still, it’s fruitless. He knew it would be, and still, still, still, he tried.

He sees you in his dreams every night, lit from within and haloed in memory. He sees your silhouette in every open doorway and hears your voice whisper in the trees. A vision, beautiful and doomed all at once.

So when the crocuses finally come into full bloom, when the leaves sprout on the trees once more and the promise of spring begins to breathe warm into the soil, he asks.

Come with me. Where to? Does it matter? 

And again, it doesn’t, because your trust bleeds deeper than your rationality, because you were born with a lamb’s heart and a martyr’s bones.

So you follow him, blindly, faithfully. Like you always have, like you always will.

There is a stillness to you that day, a gentleness in the way you’re soft with sleep and the chilly air, hair tangled, sleeves pulled over your hands to stave off the biting morning cold. He watches you trail after him through the tall grass and he thinks, with a pulse of something close to reverence: you have no idea.

The knife is a secret that rides in his back pocket. He feels it dig into the waistband of his jeans with every step. 

He hates how easy it is. Hates how willing you are to go wherever he leads. It fills him with something hot and guilty and half-divine.

The walk itself is long. The sun shifts slowly overhead, dappling the earth through the branches just beginning to bud. Wind stirs the field grass into waves while you talk, albeit quietly. You fill the silence with idle nothings—how the birds chirp louder now, how the bees have started to come back, how it finally feels like almost spring. Your voice has always been birdsong to him. He can’t quite bear the thought of never hearing it again, and he steps a little closer to you, as if it’ll help, as if it could keep you tethered together for a while longer.

Still, he takes a small, strange comfort in the math of it, that even once you're gone, he won't have long to wait.

For less than a breath, and no more than a second.

Then you’ll be together again—wherever that is. Forever, at last.

The path to the homestead is overgrown, wild with creeping vine and honeysuckle. Nature reclaiming what man abandoned. The trees part at the prairie’s edge like curtains drawn open, and there it is—the house.

It’s worse than he remembers although he was just here a few days ago.

Peeling paint, sun-bleached boards, the screen door hanging crooked on one hinge, yawning open like a jaw. A place haunted by the many lives before it.

“Creepy,” you murmur, your voice light but not mocking as you stop at the threshold to the front door. You glance back at him, lips lifting at one corner. “Strange choice for a date.”

He swallows the laugh that wants to crawl up his throat. Instead, he says, “Thought you might appreciate the quiet.”

You hum thoughtfully and push the door open by the palm of your hand, the house sighs as the door swings open, as if welcoming you home. Dust blooms in the shaft of sunlight that follows you in, and the air smells like mildew and old wood.

“You really used to come here?” you ask, glancing at him over your shoulder.

Leon nods curtly, grinding his teeth. “When I needed to be alone.”

You tilt your head, puppy-dog cute in your innocence. “That sounds sad.”

He shrugs, and in the moment of silence that follows, you don’t press; you never do. That’s what makes this harder, that endless, bottomless trust. He could feed you poison and you’d thank him for the sweetness of it.

You reach for his hand without hesitation, squeeze it once, and that’s what undoes him a little more, how easily you slip your fingers into his, how warm they are, how alive. It makes him feel divine and monstrous all at once. Like a god with a worshipper who doesn’t yet know the mausoleum she stands in was built for her bones.

You explore without fear, toeing across warped floorboards and peer into the cold fireplace, play peek-a-boo with the torn curtains and warped doorways. You run your finger along the mantle and leave behind a line in the grime.

“Feels like something out of a ghost story,” you murmur, half to yourself.

Leon just watches you from the doorway. 

Because you are the ghost. Or maybe he is. Maybe this whole house is just some purgatory he’s invented for the both of you to fall into together.

He follows you in eventually, his footsteps more timid than yours. Like one wrong move might wake something sleeping under the floorboards.

You drift from room to room like you’ve known this place for many lifetimes. He watches you go, follows behind, and thinks he should tell you everything, spill it like bile. Let the sickness come up and out and give you the chance to run.

“You okay?” you hum. 

He nods only because lying feels easier than truth, and because you already look so proud of him for letting you in.

Finally, you end up in the living room. It is near empty; a fireplace, twin bookshelves on either side, and a sunken, moth-eaten couch pushed against the far wall. It’s dusty and old, springs breaking loose, but you sit anyway, curling your legs beneath you. Leon finds his place beside you, close enough to share your warmth. You lean your head on his shoulder with a long, contented sigh, and he swears he hears the altar creak beneath you both.

“I like it here,” you murmur. “It’s quiet. Feels like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.”

It doesn’t. Not anymore. There’s only this moment, this house, this version of you, of him.

And something in Leon whispers soft and sweet, that he doesn’t have to do this. He could keep you instead. Love you right.

He turns his face into your hair and breathes you in.

He thinks: I’ll take it back. I’ll take it all back.

You kiss him before he can say it. Just a brush of your lips against his jaw, soft and searching. He turns to meet it, and your mouth finds his. He doesn’t deserve it, but he kisses you like he might anyway. The kiss lacks the desperation Leon feels bone-deep. The desperation to seek penance for the sins he is still yet to commit. Like if you forgive him now, none of it will matter. His hands tangle in your shirt, mouths barely parted but pressed in urgency nonetheless.

“I missed you,” you whisper, and he almost confesses everything then. Almost lays it at your feet like a bloodied offering.

But he just kisses you again and again and again. Slower this time, gentler, thumb brushing your cheek as he pours himself into you. And it becomes so easy to believe he can have this, that he can be this man, the one you see.

You shift into his lap, lithe and loose-limbed with leftover kiss. The taste of him still lingers, something like salt-sweet sweat on your lips.

Leon doesn’t move, but his eyes follow the curve of your face. Studies you for the last time, tries to memorise the way your eyes glimmer with life and your smile curves just for him, him, only him.

Your hands brush the hair that always falls into his eyes from his face, curl gently behind his ear and tuck it in place. You kiss the corner of his mouth, then trail your lips along the line of his jaw. Fingers wander, slow and idle, tracing the path you’d just followed with your mouth, down the strong column of his throat. You feel him swallow. 

Hands gentle as ever, sweep down and drag across the front of his shirt, slip lower still, curving down the arc of his waist, and that’s when they catch the edge of something tucked into his waistband.

He stiffens beneath you.

You tug gently, and Leon grabs your wrist with force enough to bruise. The suddenness startles you.

You try to yank your wrist free. “Leon,” you huff, confusion cinching your brows together. Again, you yank but his grip only tightens. “You’re being weird—”

Finally, you pull free, and this time Leon doesn’t stop you when your hand reaches to pull out what hides at his back. InA hunting knife glints in your hand.

It is sturdy and sharp. Worn, but cared for. It gleams faintly in the low light, all violent, jagged edge.

And you laugh, not because it’s funny, but because you’re confused, and confusion always sounds like humor when you don’t know where else to put it.

“Is this—what, for bears?” you tease, turning it over in your hands. “What kind of date are we on, woodsman? You planning to skin me for my hide?”

It’s a joke. It is. You look up at him, expecting a smile, something muttered quietly under his breath, a quip in place of the look that meets you. But Leon doesn’t laugh, nor does he move. His eyes remain on the blade in your hands, head hung.

The silence grows roots between you.

Your smile falters. “...Leon?”

His jaw twitches in place of answer.

“Why do you have this?” Your voice is smaller now, thinner. You offer it back to him. “I mean—you don’t hunt. You hate hunting.”

He doesn’t take it, just looks at you, and for the first time, you don’t recognize what’s behind blue eyes.

“Leon?”

A terrible pause. And then, finally—

“I was going to kill you.”

It doesn’t make sense. 

The words land all wrong. Scattered in the space of your mind left for you to pick up and put together. Leon watches you, kind enough or cruel enough to let you do the math of your own undoing.

“What?”

He exhales hard, like something has at long last cracked loose in his chest. Like confession is a kind of relief. Like honesty makes this better.

“I was going to kill you,” he repeats, and this time, the words sink through your chest like a stone in water. A slow, sinking dread that blooms in the pit of your stomach.

Leon watches you with something close to awe. Or grief. It’s hard to tell with him now—his expression something unreadable. A blankness you’ve never seen before.

“I brought you here to— well, to end it. I couldn’t take it anymore. You, leaving. I couldn’t... I couldn’t let the world have you. Couldn’t bear the idea of you forgetting me.”

The silence that follows is so thick and cloying you can hear your pulse in it. Feel it inside your skull, pressing behind your eyes.

You stare at him, and for once, you don’t have any words. Just a mouth full of dry cotton and a heart knocking hard against your ribcage.

“But I changed my mind,” he says quickly, urgently, like that undoes the violence in the intent. “I did. You kissed me. You looked at me like I was still—still yours. And I realized I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to hurt you. I never did.”

You feel dizzy. The room tilts. 

“I love you,” he says. “God, I love you. And I didn’t want to lie to you anymore. So I’m telling you now. I’m being honest. Doesn’t that count for something?”

You shake your head minutely. Like you’re trying to knock the thoughts loose from where they stick to the walls of your skull. Like maybe, if you shake hard enough, you’ll wake up in your own bed, sunlight on the sheets.

“You were going to kill me,” you say, and the words taste foreign in your mouth.

Leon has the audacity to startle. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

You blink slowly. “You said you brought me here to kill me.”

“I said I couldn’t do it. That I changed my mind.” His voice rises without meaning to, cracking like dry wood. “I’m— I’m trying to be honest. That’s supposed to mean something.”

You realise you’re much too close for comfort. Funny how that works. Arms that once felt like home scare you enough to flinch when he moves. But your knee still brushes his while you sit on the moth-bitten couch, and the only thing you have to defend yourself is the knife still in your hand.

But he sees it. Sees your weight shift. Sees your eyes flick to the door, to the window, away from him.

“No—hey. No.” His voice drops to a raggedy whisper. “Don’t— I’m right here.”

You’re trembling now. Not just because of what he’s said, but because of how quickly he changed. Because that blank, even calm has cracked open into something frightful. 

“I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m not,” he says again, as if repetition makes it truer.

Your mouth opens and closes uselessly. 

“You just— You said it so calmly.” Your voice cracks in fear.

Leon runs both hands through his hair, stands and paces two feet before circling back.

“I wasn’t calm,” he presses. “I was trying to be honest with you. You want me to lie instead? Pretend I didn’t think about it? Would that make you feel better?”

“You’re scaring me.”

“I changed my mind,” Leon’s voice is desperate, insistent, voice splintering as he sinks to his knees in front of you now. “I’m telling you, isn’t that worth something? Honesty should count.”

But the weight of his confession is not lightened by truth.

There is no nobility in admitting you once intended violence to the thing you claim to love. There is only a new kind of intimacy, one born not of affection, but of proximity to death.

You study him. The trembling of his hands, the wet glint in his eyes; and it is terrifying, how reasonable he sounds in his unraveling.

And more terrifying still, how he looks at you. Like a prophet would fire.

You are the last divine thing he believes in. Can’t you see? The only living being in the vastness of his mind that could save him. He has never known a love as pure as the one you had bestowed upon him. 

And so, he has built his altar.

He has knelt at it, trembling, devoted.

He has prayed to keep this—you. The purity of your love before it spoils. Before the world takes you and reshapes you into something that no longer needs him.

He would rather die by your hand than live in a world where you turn your face away.

And if you won’t kill him, if you recoil from him now, if you leave, then the death he imagined will come just the same. Not with blood, but in absence. In the slow, shriveling death of being forgotten.

You watch him. You feel the weight of his stare, of his worship, like a noose of silk. Lovely. Crushing.

And something inside you—call it instinct, call it survival—begins to recoil.

“I need to go,” you say, though the words come like a foreign tongue. Your voice doesn’t sound like your own.

It takes him a moment to hear you. Or perhaps he simply refuses. His head tips, slightly. His brow furrows.

“What?”

Your legs shift beneath you, unsteady. You glance toward the door, the night pressing up against it. Your mouth is dry. “I—I need to leave.”

He rises a little, not all the way as if he is following your movement with his own. 

“No,” he says, soft. “No, you don’t.”

“I do.” You stand. You don’t remember deciding to do it. You just know that you must. You have to get out, you have to get away, before this becomes something you can’t change.

His voice cracks as he rises after you.

“Don’t.” That’s all. Just that one word, full of ache. And then, if that is not enough—

“I love you.”

There is something utterly childlike in the way he says it. Not manipulative, not cruel. You’ve never realised just how blue his eyes look when he says I love you.

“I love you.” He says again. “I love you so much it scares me.”

It scares you too.

And as if he sees the fear in your eyes, he continues, hands coming up in surrender, palms open. “I don’t want to scare you,” he says quickly, restlessly. “That wasn’t—this isn’t how I wanted it to happen. I just… I thought if I told you the truth, that it would mean something. That you'd understand. I only meant—fuck, I just wanted to be with you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Your back bumps the wall, you didn’t even realize you were retreating.

Leon doesn’t notice just yet, caught in the undertow of everything he’s kept hidden. He keeps talking, words spilling out in a desperate, clumsy rush.

“I was going to do it. I was going to end it. I wasn’t gonna let you go alone. We’d be together. Just us. No one else.”

The room contracts. 

“Together?”

His face softens like he thinks you understand, like this is the moment he wins you back.

And then the silence tilts and shifts, because you do understand. Finally.

Not just what he said. But what he’s done.

He killed her, drowned her in that river. Killed that man, left him by the railway. The revelation is enough to make your lips part in a silent sort of scream, a gasp for air. 

Leon’s mouth is still moving—he’s saying something about fate, about love, about how he never wanted to hurt anyone but sometimes the darkness just wins.

Your vision goes hot around the edges as your stomach churns grossly, and before you realise what is happening, you double over without grace. The knife drops from your hand in an unceremonious clatter, and you slap the wall in a last attempt at balance. You’re going to be sick.

“Hey—hey,” Leon murmurs, stepping toward you, “you’re okay. Let me help—”

His hand brushes your arm and you recoil like it burns.

“Don’t touch me.”

You shove him back, and Leon stumbles, caught off balance, eyes wide with something that doesn’t look like understanding.

“Don’t touch me,” you say again, voice trembling with something more akin to fear than anger.

And when you look at him again, his sad blue eyes look like steel.

“You don’t mean that,” he says, quietly. “You’re just upset, confused.”

“Don’t— Don’t make me feel naïve.” You’re panting now. “You killed her. You killed her, Leon.”

“No, you don’t— You don’t get to say that. You don’t get to look at me like—”

You scramble to run before he can get all his words out.

But you barely make it two steps before he tackles you down, a mess of limbs and a flurry of panic. The floor rushes up too fast, your elbow cracks against it, and the air punches out of your lungs.

And in the struggle, his hands come down around your body; a vice, or a lover’s embrace, either way, suffocating.

“Let go,” and it’s only now you feel the wetness on your face, your tears cascading in tremulous waterfalls, warm and salt-bitten. “Please, Leon, let go.”

“I love you,” Leon says again, like it’s all he has left to offer, the only language his mouth remembers. “I love you, I love you.”

His breath is hot and frantic against your cheek. His hands tremble with a fevered sort of need, fight for purchase on your wrists, clammy with the truth of the sins that stain them. You can’t tell if the suffocation comes from his body atop yours, or from your sobs, which are so sharp now, so relentless, that breathing has become an afterthought.

You push at his chest with whatever strength remains in your trembling arms, but he’s stronger in desperation You try to push and push and push, but he’s twice as desperate now, pain scrambling to keep you still, to keep you his.

Your nails sink deep into his forearm, red half-moons rising, beading, bloating, where his skin breaks.

What happens next is instinct. 

Leon shoves you down and slaps you across the face. 

Blood floods your mouth instantly, warm against your tongue, and your eyes widen in shock. For a few short moments that feel like lifetimes, you can’t move. 

“You hit me,” you gasp, like it’s the worst of what has happened tonight. Like the fact of it is worse than all the other truths.

“You wouldn’t stay still,” Leon tries, eyes wide and lip trembling. “I’m sorry, you just wouldn't stay still—”

Your lip bleeds a beautiful crimson down the corner of your cheek, where his knuckle must have split the delicate skin. He watches it bloom and thinks of all the times he’s kissed you, those beautiful, soft lips.

He thumbs the blood away reverently, shaky and slow, smears it down the corner of your chin.

Leon lowers his head, lips close enough for your exhales to catch in each other’s throats. He could kiss you. He could kill you. The truth of it is terrifying.

His mouth presses to yours gently first, and for a few fleeting moments it’s familiar. Sweet and soft, like the boy you knew before. Then, his lips crush to yours in desperation—that’s all he seems to be now, the personification of desperation. 

You feel him tremble when he tastes the blood he put there. The tremble spreads through you. It’s all you can do not to scream.

You cry into the curve of his mouth because you cannot bring yourself to kiss him back. Sobs so hard and violent that your teeth clack against his, your body shuddering under the weight of it all. And still, still, still, he holds you like he thinks it might save him. Like he can love his way out of what he’s done.

You can taste your own grief with every press of his lips to yours, a dirty salt and a biting copper. 

And Leon, poor Leon, believes it means something. Still, despite everything, believes in the truth of your love.

You may call it naïvety, the way he trusts you so blindly, so much so that he doesn’t notice the way your hands shift, doesn’t feel the tension coiling in your legs, your knees folding slowly beneath him, measuring distance and breath. He’s too caught in the fantasy he’s spent weeks building, the one he gets to live in now. 

And in this moment of vulnerability, you shove him.

Leon falls backwards with a startled grunt, his balance off-kilter, arms too slow this time to catch you. His eyes are wide, wild and stunned, like he’s just been slapped awake.

Your palms slap the floor, catch the base of the stairs, claw at the banister. You drag yourself upright with what little strength is left in you, and bolt for the door. 

Sweat-slick hands of yours slip over the knob, desperate and clumsy in their desire to survive. Won’t budge. Locked, you realise with horrifying clarity. It’s locked. It hits you like an awful riptide, your own breath turning on you, as the panic settles in, and you barely even manage to duck as—

Leon lunges for you, a half-scream scratches its way up your throat, raw and aching on its way out. You pivot as fast as you can and crash back into the banister, your hands seize it like a lifeline, dragging yourself up with trembling legs, each step like a jolt to your nervous system. 

Up, up, up, you take the steps two at a time, Leon on your heels like thunder. You don’t need to chance a look over your shoulder, don’t dare when you can already feel his presence in the thick air, in the pulse of the house, in the way the walls seem to close in around you.

You hear him behind you, a string of sweet nothings that pleases for you to come back to him.

But you're smarter than that, even if a part of you wishes you weren’t. A part of you that wishes you could be naïve enough to crawl back into his arms and accept the twisted love he would kill himself to give you.

Your legs carry you down the hall, dizzy with panic as your vision blurs at the edges. You don’t know where you’re going, how you’ll escape.

Door. Door. Try a door.

The first one doesn’t budge, stuck fast, even as you rattle the handle desperately. You sob once, a sharp breath that tears from your throat, and keep going.

The second door is the same, jammed. 

Behind you, Leon’s boots thud against the last step and the floor creaks under his weight like the house gives you a warning.

“I didn’t mean to—” he pants, his voice echoing down the hallway towards you. “You have to know I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

You scream, sharp and terrified, and shove your weight into the third door. It finally gives under your weight and you tumble through, half-falling, half-running.

Leon’s hand slams flat against the door just before it shuts, fingers splayed wide like he means to claw the space between you apart. The handle jerks violently beneath your grip, the whole frame shudders under his weight as he tries to tear it open.

The cry that escapes you breaks his heart, but he can’t let you get away, not again. He loves you too much for that.

“Baby— sweetheart, please.” He begs, near hysterical, “I didn’t mean to— didn’t mean to scare you— You know I didn’t.”

You push back with everything you have, shoulder braced to the wood, feet skidding on the floor. Your heartbeat roars wildly in your ears, and you don’t realise you’ve replied until his voice comes back, soaked through with desperation.

“Stop? Stop? Why would I stop?” He emphasises his words with a harsh shove that makes you gasp in fear, “You don’t understand,” He convinces himself, “Sweetheart, let me help you understand, open the door.”

“Stop!” you shriek again. “Stop talking!”

He gives another push, enough so that the door swings open a few inches, and you see his eyes, once a cerulean, beautiful blue, now glassy, sanguine red.

“I can’t live without you,” he breathes, and it’s worse because it sounds true, his face is twisted with it. “You have to understand. I love you. I just wanted– I just needed—” You, you, you.

You scream to drown it out, wordless and panicked, and shove with everything you have. By a stroke of luck, his grip slips and the door slams shut and you twist the lock with haste. Your breath rattles in the cavern of your chest, and you wait, wait, wait. No sound comes, no movement, and just when you think it might be over, the whole frame rattles with a horrifying bang.

Quickly, you search the room for anything to barricade the door. Tucked into the corner by the door is a bookcase nearly half as tall as you. You move quickly, throw your weight against it, but even so it’s heavy. It does little but groan as it moves, sluggish and stubborn even as you push it with all your might.

Leon slams into the door again, so hard the frame begins to splinter. A terrified sob claws its way out of you.

“Please,” he begs, his voice echoing through the door.

Another bang, the walls rattle, a picture frame clatters off the wall and bursts across the floor in shards of glass.

“I know you’re scared, just— just let me in.”

The bookcase drags into place with a final grinding shriek of wood on wood. Your muscles scream. You heave again, one last time, and throw your weight against it until it finally, finally, topples over, crashing to the floor in front of the door with a thunderous bang that shakes the walls.

And at long last, silence greets you again.

Leon ceases his endless pursuit, the handle doesn’t tremble nor do the walls shake any longer.

Your hands, though, they tremble against your thighs as you double over, gasping for breath, chest tight with sobs you finally let spill out in their entirety. You don't know how long it lasts, this fleeting reprieve, but you don’t dare take it for granted.

Staggering back, you survey your surroundings.

The room you find yourself in is useless. No closet, not a back door. Just a battered desk, a thin rug, cracking wallpaper, and…

A window.

It’s small, too small even, but maybe—

You scramble to scale the desk in one desperate movement, knees thudding against its surface as your fingers feel along the window’s seam. There’s a metal lock, but it’s rusted shut. The glass is old and stubborn, and no matter how hard you yank, it won’t budge.

Leon calls through the door, rattling it’s handle.. “Sweetheart… you can’t leave. You can’t. I won’t know how to breathe without you.”

You brace your palms on the frame and try to lift the pane, but it doesn’t move. Painted shut. 

Rage rises in your throat—rage and helplessness and the sheer grief of it all. 

“No, no, no, no,” You reason, like this can’t be it, this can’t be how it ends. This house will not become your grave.

The thought of that alone makes you sob again, so you shove at the window harder, use the heel of your palm, then your elbow. Desperation overtakes the pain in your chest, and you pick the ceramic lamp off the desk, raise it high, and smash it through the glass.

Fragments rain across the room, glittering on the floor like ice. Yes! You nearly want to cry with joy. The cool night air rushes in all at once, cools the tears glistening on your cheeks. 

But then the door bursts open.

The old wood gives with a scream, the bookcase sliding uselessly across the floor. You whirl, heart in your throat. 

There stands Leon, he looks wild, desperate, gaze flitting immediately to you. You scramble, try to lift yourself through the window, as if divine intervention might save you now. But your legs won't move, stuck hopelessly in place.

Leon’s large hand wraps around your ankle, yanks you off the table and into his arms instead. You fight, of course you do, little fits and bursts of energy that die one after the other just as quick as the last. You’ve got those rheumy eyes that he hates to see, shiny and so, so sad. Those sweet eyes of yours seem to plead with him, as if beckoning him to remember your love. Why do you look at him like that? He loves you now, do you not know?

The knife in his hand nicks at the soft skin under your chin—the knife, the knife, the knife; he must’ve picked it up somewhere between the first struggle and this one—he truly doesn’t mean to, panics a little when he sees the pearl of blood bloat and dribble, but then it trails down the lines of your throat, pools in the cavern of your collar bone. Not enough just yet to leak any further.

God you’re beautiful, even like this. He really could love you forever. If only you let him.

“Leon, I don’t want to die.” Sobs blubber from your lips in desperate little fits.

“Stop saying that—” He grits. Desolate despair shakes you in his arms, and Leon’s grip on the knife tightens anxiously. 

You struggle fruitlessly, kick your legs at him and try to wrestle out of his grip. The horrifying realisation that you are going to die tonight sets in stone, and you plead in vain despite what little air you have left—waste your last breaths on words you have repeated so, so many times. Please, stop, no.

And you wish that instead, you could spend your last moments loving him. Your boy, your Leon. That maybe, if you had just tried harder, this wouldn’t have happened. If only you could reach out, through the cracks in his ribs, and hold his hellbound heart in your hands. Sew the beating flesh back together in hopes you can piece what is so broken. He is your Leon, after all. Yours, yours, yours.

So you reach for him, to hold, to kiss, to soothe, maybe. 

But like spooking an animal, you scare your killer. Worried he might lose you, you might make your escape, he presses the knife tighter. And fear itself is much like an animal, you flinch, and it happens fast. Faster than Leon anticipated it would. 

A slip of his hand and the knife sinks in with sickening grace, one clean motion and your skin parts like silk. Blood spills down your neck in shimmering, shining rivulets. A rushing river of crimson that trails along the notch of your collarbone, then spills lower, soaking into the fabric of your sweater. 

Your body slumps quickly and unceremoniously in his arms. Like the life drains out of you in a single breath. There’s so much blood, and Leon doesn’t even realise he’s dropped the knife until his feet slip on it while trying to hold you up. Horror blurs his vision, your blood stains his hands. It’s pungent, that copper, the tackiness of it, the way it clings to his fingers, hands, forearms.

And Leon can’t help but think of the rabbit. The way it had kicked and writhed fruitlessly, he had felt like a god holding its limp body in his hands as it trashed and kicked, as he made the decision to kill rather than keep. The way the first blood of his first kill had stained his hands like absolution, although, this seems to feel more like it.

Like the real absolution. Like the terrifying realisation of the truth. You are never coming back.

In Leon’s head, you had obliged to his plan easily. His little doe, sweet and naïve. You would’ve said yes, leaned into his touch like he was something to be worshiped. He would’ve died with you, wouldn’t have had to live in a world without you for more than a second. 

Romeo and Juliet.

But now he holds your darling body dead in his arms, and can’t figure out why he did it.

He wants to ask you to wake up, to look at him, but your head slumps forward every time he jostles your body. And when he pushes you up by the forehead, smearing your blood along your face, the skin at your neck tears further, rips so sickeningly he can hear it.

Leon cries. 

He tries to hold you together in his arms as he sinks to the floor. Your forehead rests against his shoulder, limp now, your blood seeping through his shirt until it clings to his skin like a layer of guilt. He doesn’t realise he’s crying until he starts gasping for breath, until the sobs shake his chest so violently that he can’t hold on to you, not with how hard his hands are trembling.

Your warmth leaves you faster than he thought it would. But still, impossibly, your chest glows beneath his hand. Like the sun still lives in you, tucked beneath your ribs, a stubborn ember of life that refuses to go dark, even as his world turns to shades grey around you.

He presses his hand flat to your sternum, like he could maybe feel it flicker.

And with what little strength he has left, he decides to finish what he started—while your heart is still sunlit, while your body is still warm with the memory of the girl you used to be.

The forest is silver in the early light, soft and damp from the night’s weeping. Morning stretches over the horizon in a slow yawn, brushing the treetops in bruised lilac and pale blue. The birds have begun to stir, distantly, hesitantly, like even the world has begun to mourn you.

Leon’s arms ache terribly, but it’s the kind of ache that is reminiscent of what he imagined Christ must’ve felt, bearing the cross. The knife rides silently at the small of his back once more, tucked into the waistband of his jeans. The underbrush snags at his trousers, scratches his ankles, but he doesn’t stumble, he knows where he’s going.

He doesn’t mind the way your limbs loll with the gentle sway of his gait, he is sure to hold you carefully, to not jostle you too much in your peace. His steps are careful and slow, as though he’s walking a sanctified path through the nave of a church.

The altar is only just up ahead.

He finds the clearing just as the sun splits the trees. Crocus blossoms bloom like bruises across the forest floor, lavender and cream, petals open in the dying moonlight. He steps carefully through them. Then, he kneels, and lays you down.

He fixes your clothes first. Smooths the hem of your sweater, buttons what he can. Then your hair—sticky and matted in places—he combs through it with his fingers, untangling, arranging, brushing it back behind your ears. There is blood on your face, flakes and smudges, copper stains across your cheeks. He leans in and kisses you softly. Your lips are cold, your skin already stiffening. But he kisses you anyway, and the dried blood cracks under the heat of his mouth, melts on his tongue like salt.

Your eyes have gone glassy, that beautiful color he once loved, now hollow, vapid, gone. He closes them softly, kisses each eyelid as goodbye but only for now. Only for now.

He lays beside you for a moment, his shoulder against yours, and closes his eyes. Pretends, pretends childishly, that this is just one of your mornings. Pretends you’ll wake, turn to him, smile softly, call to him in your saccharine voice, Leon? Leon? Wake up, you’d say, a gentle playful grin on your warm, soft lips.

They’ll find you like this, he thinks. Someone will see the door broken down, the blood on the floor, and follow the trail across the prairie and into the woods. They’ll find the two of you laid out like sculptures in the crocuses. He wants you to look like lovers. When someone finds you, they’ll say, look how gently he loved her. 

And it was love. Wasn’t it?

Even this—this ruin, this horror—came from love. The kind of love that is known to shake the bones and rip out reason. The kind of love that makes you do things, unspeakable things, because how else could you hold onto something so bright? So human?

He knows what he did, but there’s no forgiveness that comes with it. No redemption in it either. He thinks of your eyes—lovely now still, yet touched by death. The way they looked at him in those final moments, not with hatred, but with sorrow, with recognition. That’s what gutted him most, he thinks. Not that you feared him, but that you knew him, knew what he’d become, and mourned him before you died.

But still, still, still, you had loved him once. Before the fever took hold. Before he mistook obsession for undying devotion. You loved him then. And maybe, just maybe, that love still lingers in some soft, invisible corner of the world.

He is not naïve. He doesn’t think you’ll forgive him. But he hopes, god, he hopes, that wherever your soul went, it remembers him as he was. Not the monster who slit your throat, but the boy who learned how to love by watching you.

Maybe in the next life, he thinks. Maybe next time, it’ll be different. Maybe you’ll find him first. Maybe he’ll get to be yours again—just yours.

He takes your hand in his once more, squeezes your cold fingers tightly, and holds the knife in the other.

The serrated blade’s glistening edge finds the soft give of his throat. Leon’s chest rattles with the last breath of his.

He really did love y—

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[sweeterthanficstion]

I LOVE YOUR WRITING SMMM!!!! I get so giddy every time you post 😛

THANK YOUYYY i love seeing you in my inbox it makes my day GENUINELY ❤️

[sweeterthanficstion]

— coast2coast (pt. one) || l.s.k

pairing: life guard!leon kennedy x surfer!fem!reader

tags: surfing au! set in malibu, 1998, i wrote this with re2 leon in mind but re4 leon works too, featuring claire (and chris in later parts!), UNEDITED!! so far only fluff (unheard of...) i'll add as i go!

oh actually, my shitty attempt at knowing anything about surfing despite learning everything through youtube, google and malibu rising by taylor jenkins reid (what started this whole thing). i am NAWT a pro --- so if any of you guys actually know a thing or two abt surfing hit me up!!! i'd love to learn more!

summary: Summer is a fickle thing, sticky-sweet and fleeting, gone before you're ready. You've learnt to love it while it lasts. For you, every summer has been the same—surf, sand, salt-water tides and the hot Malibu breeze. But this summer brings a new sort of challenge, a spotlight your not so sure you're ready for, as well as a boy with golden hair, eyes as blue as the waves, and a way of making your heart rattle between your ribs like it’s desperate to break free.

word count: 2.6k

a/n: AHH HI! i'm so excited to post this one!! it's currently summer here in australia and i've been down at the beach nearly every weekend, so it was only inevitable that my fixation on surfer!leon came back full force. i have this big story all set up in my head, but i was too excited to wait to finish writing it so i'm posting it in parts!! ++ oh also i had no idea corral beach was an actual place in malibu so my version is fictionalised. just. take everything in this fic with a grain of salt i have no idea what im doing lol

i also thought it'd be really fun idea since i'm so busy nowadays, that if you guys are interested at all, you can send in little ideas for blurbs for surfer!leon, and i'd love to write them! i'll figure out ways to fit them into the story, just as little extras, but obviously no promises on writing all of them!! i'll likely just pick the ones i think fit best into the plot. i just think that'd be AWESOME!! <3

playlist⭑masterlist⭑AO3 ⭑ series masterlist⭑next part (coming soon)

California is exactly how you’d left it. Exactly how you remember it. Nothing has changed between the sand beneath your toes and the palm trees lining the scorching hot tar roads, their shadows stretching long and thin like sleepy cats in the afternoon sun. The salt-kissed air wraps around you, sticky and warm, a gentle reminder that time moves slower here. Or maybe it doesn’t move at all. 

That’s the thing about California. A time capsule—sun, sand and sky.

June, July, August, Summer melts in your mouth like a sticky popsicle, one into the next, so quick you forget what it tastes like before it’s even passed.

No matter where you are in the world, what waves you're chasing, whether it be in Oceania, the Pacific, the Atlantic, summer melts, fickle and eager.

You’ve learnt to love it while it lasts.

“Another fish and chips!” One of the waitress staff calls from the front—Bunny’s Seafood Diner has been around for as long as you can remember, a weathered little gem perched off the coast of Corral Beach, Malibu. A quick and convenient right turn off the PCH, it’s a lighthouse for road-tripping families and sunburned surfers chasing their next ride.

You flip the fryer around your wrist with a practised flourish, “On it!” You call back, before you dip the metal back in the bubbling oil, the familiar sizzle of golden fries accompanying the bustle of the late afternoon rush. The kitchen smells of salt and grease and the faint tang of fresh-caught fish, a scent so familiar it clings to your skin like a second layer.

Claire breezes past with lazy grace, bumping her hip against yours. “Heading to the surf after?” she asks, her grin as wide as the beach outside, like her mouth was made for holding sweet oranges on hot summer days. She’s balancing a seafood basket in one hand and a plate of fries in the other, weaving through the bustle with the ease of someone who’s done it a thousand times before.

“How’s the forecast looking?” You ask back instead, tossing the crispy fries into a basket lined with deli paper. 

“High tide in twenty,” Claire winks over her shoulder at you, side-stepping a counter corner like it’s second nature. “It’s gonna be perfect.”

You can’t deny that does sound perfect. After a shift as long as the one you’ve worked today, a surf might be all you need to feel alive again. You look back up at the foggy old clock on the wall—ten minutes left, five if you can sweet-talk your manager. You end up counting the minutes in your head, that familiar itch to feel the sand under your feet and the sun on your skin insatiable. 

By the time the clock hits four, you’re halfway out the door, ready to trade the smell of fried seafood for the briny tang of the ocean instead. Claire is hot on your heels, boards tucked under both your arms as she chases you across the tar road that burns under your bare feet, down the splintering boardwalk, and onto the powdered-sugar sands of Corral Beach.

The sun has already dipped far past it’s zenith, and the world feels washed in gold. Golden rays stretch out across shimmering waters, painting streaks of honey over the horizon, the heat settling into a balmy hum that sticks to your skin in a way you can only love.

You follow the shaded path of sycamore trees until the beach opens up to surfer’s paradise—a long stretch of sand, waves that swell and crash, aching to be carved into by hungry surfers. The path curves past a weathered wooden bulletin board, been there as long as you can remember, and you think it might be older than Bunny’s, if that’s even possible. 

“Wait!” Claire stops in her tracks, and you are helpless but to comply. Your eyes stay glued longingly to the beach while Claire’s squint at the array of flyers pinned up—some faded, some fresh. There’s a yoga class, a missing dog poster, and the usual surf report stapled to the corner, its ink smudged from damp fingers. But her eyes zero in on something bright and bold and new. 

“Here we go.” She plucks a flyer off the board, turning it toward you like she’s struck gold. The words Corral Beach Annual Surf Comp are printed in big, blocky letters, accompanied by a grainy photo of a surfer carving into a wave.

“Oh, no,” you groan, already shaking your head.

“Oh, yes,” Claire says, a grin spreading across her face.

Claire’s been singing the same song since you were fifteen and cutting through waves better than most kids your age here on Corral Beach. That you should be out there winning trophies and medals and 10k cheques instead of cleaning out the back of the greasy old fryer’s in Bunny’s. 

“C’mon, you have to do it!” She bugs on, waving the flyer around like some magic wand. 

You laugh, ducking under her arm as she tries to push it into your face. “Claire, come on.”

“I’m serious!” she insists, jogging to catch up with you as you head toward the water. “You’re out here every day. You’ve got the moves, the skill—everything they’re looking for.”

It’s not like you haven’t thought about it. You’ve been surfing since before you could walk. You’d grown up right here on Corral Beach, knew these waves better than yourself. You’d watched your parents chase waves like it was their religion—Bali, Costa Rica, Australia, it was their entire life. Something they loved that was inevitable for you to love too. 

“I’m just not the competition type,” you shrug, gaze drifting out to the waves curling in the distance. It’s not that you don’t want to—well, okay, maybe it is. The idea of standing out there, under the scrutiny of judges, crowds, and strangers, feels about as foreign as the first time you stepped onto a board. Surfing, to you, is about as religious as it is to your parents. An outlet, an art form, the ocean calms your restless soul when you need it most. Putting a score to something like that just doesn’t feel right.

“You’re one of the best surfers out here.” Claire presses, she does it so effortlessly. Poking and prodding, always enough but never so much as to push you over the edge. “Half the people in those comps are just there for a shot at a new wetsuit.”

You meet Claire’s gaze, hesitate, the memory of your dad paddling out at dawn or your mom teaching you how to duck dive flickering in your mind. “It’s not about that. My parents taught me how to surf before they taught me how to say mom and dad. They’d enter comps now and then, but it was never about winning. It was about the waves, the adventure.”

“And you don’t think that’s in you too?” Claire asks, raising an eyebrow as she shields her eyes against the sun.

“Maybe it is,” you say finally. “But that’s their story, not mine.”

Claire’s gaze softens for all of a second before she snorts, shoving your shoulder with her own. “You’re so full of it. You’ve got more talent in your pinky than most people out there. Just think about it, okay? It could be fun.”

You do nothing of the sort.

The second your feet are in the water, you forget all about the comp, all about your job and any other worries on your mind. Salt water seems to have that sort of effect on you. Wasting no time, both you and Claire paddle past the surf, straddling your boards in the ocean, watching as the other surfers before you take off one by one with each new wave that rolls in.

It doesn't take long before the first wave in a gorgeous set comes in, Claire’s all but primed for it. She takes off, gets into position, and pops up on her board, carving into it like it’s breathing. You follow suit as the next one comes in, and just like that, you fall into the rhythm of the ocean.

Wave after wave, you don’t stop until the sun is cotton candy pink, purple, gold. Most of the other surfers have dispersed by now, and Claire’s traded shredding the bigger waves for wading through the calm waters with her back pressed against the flat of her board. 

You, on the other hand, feel like fate is decidedly on your side. You watch as another set rolls in, the first crashing just out of reach. It peels exactly as you’d hoped, slowly to the right, so when the next one rolls in right after, you paddle with it, catch the feeling of the tide underneath you, and like it's simply second nature, get to your feet.

This is where you feel most alive. There is not a second to spare for the other noise in your head, not about the past nor the future nor anything in between other than right here and now. Nothing but the instinctual insistence of how much longer can you stay on? How much longer can you keep your balance? Lean left, right, forward. Better, longer, more, more, more.

And when you’ve finally completed your balancing act, you dance up to the nose, hovering there on the tip of your board, arms out to steady yourself like sails catching wind, and then you close your eyes and let the crash of the wave topple you off.

It’s only once you’ve resurfaced, board nowhere to be seen, that you realise you didn’t feel the familiar tug of the leash around your ankle. By the time you drag yourself to shore, breath heavy and hair clinging to your face, you see it—the measly cord trailing behind you, frayed and snapped clean.

You huff a sigh, not surprised. It had been old crap for a while now. So had the board, but it carried enough summers in its scars to mean something. A history you weren’t quite ready to part with.

Claire’s already gathering her things by the time you meet her on the sand, shaking out her towel and tossing it into her worn tote bag.

“What happened to your board?” she asks, her tone casual, but her raised brow suggests she’s caught the fraying leash.

You lift your ankle and let the cord dangle, the sad state of it all the explanation she needs.

She winces, offering you a sympathetic smile. “Ouch. Guess it’s finally time for a new one?”

It’s only when you’re halfway up the beach that you spot it again. Your board? Your board!

It’s leaning lazily against the base of a lifeguard tower, looking as though it had simply wandered off and decided to wait for you all this while. Relief blooms in your chest, and you call to Claire that you’ll catch up.

It’s only when you’re closer that you notice him.

He’s standing by the lifeguard tower, a red rescue can slung casually over his shoulder. Blonde hair catches the light, tousled and damp like he’s been in the water himself. His broad shoulders are framed by the white-and-red uniform shirt that looks a little too crisp for someone who spends their day in the sun.

You can tell he’s new. There’s a hesitation in the way he stands, like he’s trying to look comfortable in a place he hasn’t quite claimed yet. But there’s something magnetic about him, the way he surveys the beach with quiet curiosity, like he’s soaking in every detail.

And you don’t mean to stare, but you’re caught in the moment, the way he looks like he belongs there despite it all, carved from the same sun and salt as the beach itself.

You’re still staring when his eyes meet yours.

They’re blue, impossibly so, the kind of blue that reminds you of the water when it’s so clear you can see straight to the bottom, the kind of blue you could fall into and forget how to breathe. His mouth quirks into a smile—easy, natural, like he’s been doing it all his life.

For a heartbeat, the world shifts, tilts ever so slightly, like the two of you are caught in some half-remembered dream. Something stirs in your chest, familiar yet unnameable, like déjà vu soaked in sunlight. You freeze, caught like a fish on a line, just before his eyes crinkle at the corners, and he lifts a hand in a casual wave.

“Hey,” he calls out, his voice carries over the sound of the waves, warm and low, and you think there’s a hint of the coast in it—just not this one.

You blink, salt-sticky and sun-drunk, realizing belatedly that you’re still rooted to the spot. “Hey,” you manage, shifting your weight on your feet.

He doesn’t move, but his attention is all yours now, quiet and steady, as though nothing else on the beach exists, like you’re the most interesting thing he’s ever laid eyes on.

“Nice ride out there,” he says, nodding toward the water, his voice dipped in easy admiration. “That last wave—you made it look easy.”

A laugh bubbles out of you, unplanned but genuine, a flush to your cheeks at the notion of being watched and noticed. You hope he mistakes it for sunburn. “Easy? You sure you weren’t watching someone else?”

“Nope,” he says, the smile widening just a fraction. “Definitely you. The board gave it away.” He says, nodding towards the board that’s still propped against the lifeguard tower like a loyal dog.

“Ah,” you say, realising. “So it was you.”

He shrugs, sweet and boyish in his sincerity. “Figured it deserved better than drifting out to sea.”

You glance down at your battered shortboard, the paint long faded from years of sun and surf. The edges are chipped, and the wax is uneven, but it feels like a part of you. “Thanks,” you say, meaning it. “Guess I owe you one.”

And before you can really think it through, the words escape you all at once. “You surf?”

“Not like that,” he hums, tilting his head toward the waves. Not like you. “Still trying to figure out how to make it look as easy.”

“That’s how it starts,” you say, a grin pulling at your lips despite yourself. “You’ll get there.”

He shrugs, a bit sheepish. “We’ll see. I’m mostly here for this,” he hefts the rescue can with a crooked smile. “Started lifeguard training last week. Figured I’d better get to know the locals.”

“Locals, huh?” You arch a brow, a subtle quirk to your lips. “And I’m one of those?”

“Definitely,” he grins, his voice sure now, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You’ve got that look.”

“What look?”

“Like this is where you belong.”

The words hang in the air, sweet and sticky like the heat of the day. For a moment, you don’t know what to say.

“Well,” you manage, recovering with a nod toward the tower. “Welcome to Corral Beach. Try not to let it chew you up and spit you out.”

He laughs then, and it’s warm, golden—like sunlight filtering through the trees. “I’ll do my best.”

He steps back, making space for you to collect your board, though his gaze lingers, like he’s reluctant to go but knows he should. 

“See you around?” he asks, the question carrying a hopeful edge.

“Maybe,” you say, the word feeling light and easy as you turn toward the parking lot.

You don’t look back, but you feel his eyes linger, and it leaves a quiet sort of thrill in your chest, like the first rush of catching a wave.

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[sweeterthanficstion]

@crsssie LOOK

Surfer Leon

[sweeterthanficstion]

— between here and there || l.s.k

pairing: ghost!leon kennedy x ghosthunter!fem!reader

tags: set in 2001, graphic depictions of dead animals one is right under the cut, mentions of death, mentions of grief, mentions of violence, themes of obsession and love, implied/referenced childhood abuse inflicted by a parent, typical horror topics. (if i missed anything pls dm me and let me know!!)

summary: Even if it is full of love, all a ghost can do is haunt. Or: The year is 2001, and you've just found out about a haunted homestead on a prairie, sure to hold a million mysteries within its rotting walls. You've chased rumors of the supernatural before, but this place feels... different. Maybe this time, you'll find the evidence you need to prove the existence of the other side—and finally go viral. But quickly you come to learn that some doors, once opened, can't be shut.

word count: 6.6k

a/n: i wrote 80% of this fic on my phone, so i'm sorry if it reads badly 😔, i hope you enjoy regardless though! and things will make more sense in the coming parts, i promise <3 also; thank you claudia for beta-reading for me!! n also thank you @/uhlunaro for bone-chill, go read their work!! it's so good n inspired this fic.

playlist ⭑ AO3 || back to the party ⭑ next (coming soon) »

You were eight when you saw your first ghost. Your mother had found you with your face pressed up against the living room window, eyes wide as you stared out into your backyard, convinced there was a dog by the fence that was staring right back.

Your mother had ushered you back to bed, murmuring about how there was no dog out there, and you needed to sleep. But you saw him! You swear it! Floppy ears and a bone between his teeth.

You couldn’t sleep that night, tossing and turning and anxiously waiting for morning to come. By the time the sunlight had crept through your window, you scampered outside to prove it. You’d spent nearly an hour out in the early morning cold, digging, digging, digging with your bare hands, until eventually, you found it, something that wasn’t a dog—not anymore, anyway.

Wrapped in a plastic bag you found it, decayed skin clinging stubbornly to yellowed ribs poking through like splintered wood. Its jaw hung open, snapped and crooked, patches of fur still clinging to the skull, matted until it resembled something more like melted plastic. There was a sense of grief that came with finding its body, a suffocating presence that weighed down over your little lungs, tightened your oesophagus, made your stomach clench.

You gave the rotting dog carcass a proper burial. 

A grave by the oak tree, dirt pressed down gently over its brittle body as if the dog might still feel it, a ring of daisies set atop in remembrance. When you finally stood, wiping mud-stained hands on your pants, you could feel your mother’s eyes on you, her silence heavier than her words ever were.

After that, her patience thinned. She’d catch you whispering to empty rooms, her voice sharper each time, the snap of her voice was soon paired with the snap of a belt. The corners of your room were just corners, she’d say. The shadows were just that; shadows. 

You stopped talking about it, but the flashes of something stayed—the fleeting movements, the whispers, the shadows that lingered in the corners of your vision. The haunting weight of it all clung to you like a thick blanket, creeping in with every bump in the night, until curiosity bled into something deeper. 

Eventually, you gave up waiting and started searching, looking for answers between ghost-hunting forums and haunted houses. 

And now, years later, you’re chasing a truth you’re still yet to prove. 

You jolt from your thoughts the same time the van does over a potholed, eyes snapping to the stretch of dirt road before you. The homestead comes into view, your breath catches in your throat at the sight of it—looking every bit more eerie when bathed in hues of twilight than it did in the grainy two-bit photos on your laptop screen. 

Luis lets out a low whistle from the driver’s seat, before he clicks his tongue and puts the car into park. “Well, we’ve seen worse.”

Luis says it with an air of carelessness you struggle to stomach under the looming shadow of the homestead. He’s never believed in the paranormal the same way you do, always the wind, always a shadow to him, everything has an explanation. Never a ghost, never a spirit.

Yet, he sticks with you, out of what sense of loyalty you’re not entirely sure, but you’re grateful all the same. Maybe it’s the remnants of a childhood bond that keeps him tethered to your side, echoes of sleepovers and whispered secrets, of nights spent laughing over nothing, long before you were chasing shadows and seeking the dead.

It’s not that Luis doesn’t care—he does, more than he’ll ever admit. He just doesn’t see the world the way you do. And that’s okay. He doesn’t have to believe. You do.

He slides out of the car easily, no doubt eager to unpack the camera gear. You hear the back of the van slide open, before you finally make the decision to move, feeling as if your bones have stuck themselves together—rigor mortis.

The homestead looks like it’s rotting from the inside out. Once-grand pillars holding up the front porch that have long since bowed, wood that rots and splinters from years of neglect. The windows, fogged over with dust, are cracked and warped as if the house itself has been trying to keep the world out for far too long.

“What even happened here?” Luis asks, eyeing the decayed structure with a grimace as the both of you step onto the creaking front porch.

In truth, the research had been thin. The house didn’t show up on any official ghost-hunting registry, and there wasn’t much mention of it in local history. But there were enough stories, enough pieces of something to make you believe it was worth the three hour plane trip.

If no one else could get proof, then maybe you could. This could be your big break, could be your skyrocket to supernatural stardom—If that was even really a thing.

“A lot. Murders, disappearances, all the fun stuff.” You joke, flashing a wide grin over your shoulder, trying to ease the pit in your chest, and find amusement at the way Luis shivers at the mention of murders. His shoulders stiffen enough to make you bite back a laugh.

Luis fixes you with a hard stare. “You’re not right, anyone ever tell you that?”

“Plenty of times,” you reply, grin only widening. You reach up and give his cheek a playful pat, “You’re not special.”

He rolls his eyes and you’re well aware he doesn’t buy your teasing, but that’s half the fun. You slip past him to check out the entryway, Luis trailing behind with his camera over his shoulder.

Luis keeps his distance as you wedge the door open. A thick layer of dust comes loose with the movement, swirling with the fading light and wafting straight into your face. You cough violently, waving it away with a grimace.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Luis mutters, adjusting the lens of his camera.

“Nothing’s going to happen—” And as if infuriatingly on cue, the door slips from your gasp and slams shut with a bone-rattling thud.

The both of you jump despite yourselves—Luis lets out a yelp that he stifles with a cough, while you freeze, hand still hanging in the air where the door had once been.

The silence that follows is deafening. You stare at the door for a beat, pulse-quickening as if it might just spring open again on its own, while you feel the burn of Luis’ gaze in the back of your neck, waiting for you to explain it away with your usual bravado.

You lower your hand slowly, give him a sidelong glance. You take a step back from the door as if daring it to open or slam shut again. “Well. That’s one way to make an entrance.”

Luis glares at you. “Yeah, real funny. Can we leave now?”

Rolling your eyes, you reach for the handle and tug the front door open again, choosing to ignore Luis’ insistence. The homestead is as quiet as you imagined it’d be, even so you can’t shake the eeriness of the silence. You swear you can hear static in your head.

Luis hands you a flashlight, which you flick on before toeing the warped floorboards. The wood groans beneath you, but it holds, so you plant your foot fully inside, waiting for the house to react. One second. Two.

Nothing.

With a relieved sigh you step deeper into the homestead. The pale remains of sunlight filter through grimy windows, while dust swirls lazily in the beam of your flashlight as you sweep it across the room.

“Are you recording?” You whisper over your shoulder to Luis, who gives a quick nod, a thumbs-up flashing in your periphery.

The homestead opens up around you—parlour to the left, kitchen and dining room through the door on the right, and a staircase, old and worn, curling up toward the shadows in the back.

“We’ll set up in the parlour,” you murmur, moving toward it. Your hand brushes against the wall as you reach for the light switch, fingers hesitant. You flick it, expecting nothing. But then the chain bulb overhead sputters to life, casting a weak, flickering glow across the room.

“Huh,” you breathe. “Not bad.”

Nightfall comes sooner than you would’ve hoped, and you’re starting to understand why there’s so little about this homestead online. In the two long hours you and Lewis have been here, the silence has remained unbroken. The EMF reader has not spiked once and the camera has picked up nothing. No doors have slammed, nothing has creaked strangely, not even an unsettlingly cold gust of wind. 

Maybe this place is a waste of time, another dead end to add to your already growing list. You contemplate if packing the van up now is a good option. But yet, yet—you can’t shake the feeling that there is something waiting for you here, just beyond reach. A presence. A secret.

There’s still upstairs, a voice nags at the back of your head. Rooms yet to explore, yet to be turned inside out so you can find what’s hidden in the confines of this home’s brittle bones.

Luis follows behind as you carve a path up the stairs, flicking the stairwell light on and waiting for the flicker of the bulb to cease into a steady hum. It takes a moment too long, and your fingers twitch at the edge of your flashlight.

You never did shake your fear of the dark.

Upstairs, the floor is dappled in the pale glow of the moon. You sweep your flashlight through the shadows, the light catching on each warped surface, every peeling edge of wallpaper, casting lonesome shadows across the splintering floors. You watch the EMF reader calibrate and tick in your hand as you tread further down the hallway. The air up here feels heavier, like it’s holding its breath, waiting for you.

That’s when you see it.

Or him, rather. 

At first, you make out nothing but a vague shape standing at the end of the hallway, a shadow where there shouldn’t be one.

But as your eyes adjust, you make out the figure’s skin; a sickly pale, marred with crawling veins like rivers of ink. He has hair like dull flaxen straw, eyes that are such a piercing blue you make them out even in the dark. You freeze, your breath catching in your throat as a chill crawls down your spine. You take a step back, stumbling into Luis, who nearly drops the camera.

The light overhead flickers dramatically before the bulb bursts with a sharp pop, plunging the hall into sudden darkness. Your EMF reader spikes violently in time with your heart slamming against your ribs, and in the panic, you scramble to bring up your flashlight—but as the beam sweeps over him, he vanishes, parts of his body disintegrating into the light, like bend the rules of physics themselves, like something wrong.

“Is that—?” it hits Luis the same time it hits you. Not a person. A ghost.

But there’s no haunting glow, no cloud of smoke. He doesn't float; in fact he doesn’t move at all. Instead, the air grows thick, an oppressive weight that threatens to shatter your ribs inwards and pierce into your lungs.

You hear him. The sickly sound of breathing, a rasping inhale followed by an exhale, like a death rattle. The noise crawls under your skin, itches against your bones.

Your own breath catches in your throat in favour of hearing his. The sound swells, crescendos, then tithers to nothing. Silence, like buzzing in your ears, is all that’s left behind. Slowly, you peel your  eyes open, the ghost is nowhere to be seen.

You come back to reality like ungluing yourself from a fly trap—slowly, sticky, the numbness in your body ceases.

“Did you.. Did you get that on tape?” You ask Luis between bated breath, eyes still glued to the wall where he had been.

Luis swallows hard, his breathing ragged. He fumbles with the camera, fingers trembling, flipping through settings with a frantic sort of urgency. His face drains of colour as he checks the screen. The camera blinks, sputters.

Panic surges as you rush downstairs, tripping over your feet. Luis yanks the camera from his shoulder, flipping it open to review the footage. His hands move fast, flipping through buttons…

Then, the camera shuts off with a mechanical click, the small screen fading to black.

"No, no, no," Luis mutters, voice tight with frustration. He pulls out the tape reel, and the acrid smell hits you first. He stares at it, brow furrowing. You step closer, peering over his shoulder. The reel is ruined—burnt and blackened beyond recognition, as if scorched by something unseen.

Neither of you says a word.

“Sorry, we’re full.”

The words feel like a death sentence this late at night. Luis sighs sharply, his breath fogging up the plexiglass screen between him and the motel keeper. “There’s got to be something, no? Just one room,” he mutters, pushing the crumpled fifty across the counter one more time, almost pleading.

The motel keeper eyes the money, before shaking her head. “I’m serious, hon,” she says, her voice flat, tired. “We’re booked solid. You can try the highway if you’re desperate.”

You’re really only half-listening to the exchange, shivering from the cold as you lean by the side of the van parked under the carport. 

The motel sign above flickers weakly, casting uneven shadows across the parking lot, the words The Black Dog barely legible in the failing neon glow. Cerberus snarls from the sign like a bad omen, one head flickering on and off as if it’s ready to give up entirely.

After the encounter at the homestead, neither Luis nor yourself could shake the feeling of dread that had settled like a thick fog, a weighted blanket that provided more unease than comfort. The decision to leave for the night had been easy, but now, standing outside in the frigid air, you’re starting to feel the sting of bad luck. There are only two motels in this entire town—one’s closed for maintenance, and this one, The Black Dog, is fully booked.

Luis pulls back from the counter with a groan, stuffing the money into his pocket as he joins you outside. “No luck,” he mutters, breath curling in the chilled air.

But you're distracted, focused on the yellowing photographs lining the walls behind the motel keeper’s desk, town history captured in fleeting moments behind dusty glass. Your eyes widen in realisation when you note the homestead is in one of them. A farmer’s family stands at the front of it; a husband, a wife, his daughter and two sons.

You quickly rush up to the window, leaning down closer to the little cutout in the plexiglass as you rest your elbows on the counter. “That photo,” You start, finger pressed to the plastic surface, “do you know who the people in it are?”

The motel keeper swivels in her squeaky office chair, her eyes widening with a sort of realisation. “Them? Well they’re the original settlers of this land,” She hums, turning back. “Their family were the first to come this far east, their father built that homestead with his bare hands.”

“What happened to them?” You ask, your curiosity piqued. Desperate for more, desperate for answers. Although, your ghost looks nothing like any of the men in the picture.

“Well they died,” The motel keeper says, something akin to god-fearing in her voice. “But whatever malevolent force has been haunting that place never did.”

You stare at her, wide-eyed and unblinking. Luis fills in for you where you can’t. 

“You’re not serious,” he says, but it comes out more like a question than a statement.

“Dead serious, hon. That place is no good. They say the prairie wind drove that family mad—” she states, sticking a thumb over her shoulder to point to the picture “—we’re just not so sure it was the wind that did it.”

You decidedly spend that night in the back of the van, parked right outside the homestead on that old gravel path. 

The wind whistles terribly and you begin to understand what they mean by prairie fever—you can’t fathom what it would’ve been like, out here, all alone with nothing but the wind and the wolves.

“Something’s wrong,” Luis murmurs just loud enough for you to hear. You turn your head, watching as he stares at the ceiling of the van.

There is a sudden unease that settles in your chest, watching him like this. Luis has never been rattled by the dark, never questioned the supernatural because he didn’t have a reason to. In many ways, he has been your anchor.

And what is a ship without its anchor?

You hum, mirroring his movements and righting your neck to stare up at the ceiling. “Luis, you say this every—”

“No, I mean it.” He cuts in, a certain urgency to his words. “We saw something, I saw it. He was–” His words die, fizzle into nothing on his tongue as if it’ll be a sin to refer to the shadow as anything more than just a shadow. “We can’t go back in there.”

You understand… yet you don’t.

“This is the closest we’ve ever been Luis, what do you mean we can’t?” Your words are oddly calm despite the desperation they clearly convey, “You know how much this means to me.”

Luis sighs, “I get it, I’m just not sure this is a good idea.” He hesitates. “I think… I think we’re way in over our heads this time.”

“I’ll be careful. I promise.”

Luis holds you to it.

A car crash—that’s what you see in your dream. Although, it feels more like a vision; a premonition or maybe a memory. 

You’re trapped behind your own eyes, sitting rigid in the passenger seat. There’s the sound of tyres screaming against the asphalt, a horrible blur of red and blue, glass and smoke. 

The car swerves hard, jerking your body with it, weightless, floating, falling. The ground falls away, and for a split second, there’s nothing. Just the sound of your own heartbeat pounding in your ears. 

You try to catch a glimpse of the driver, but your eyes are glued to the chaos that unfolds before you. You catch a glimpse of the side of his face, shadowed in the flickering lights. Just the curve of his jawline—sharp, familiar.

And then you slam into a tree.

The night is much less forgiving than day. In moonlight, your mind is left to fill in the gaps, pulls at the seams of reality, and paints over it with every fear you’ve ever had the cowardice to bury. A creak in the floor becomes footsteps. A sigh of wind becomes a distant cry. 

But daylight? Daylight spills over the horizon like a gentle promise. In daylight, things feel explainable. Safe. You do not falter and question the shape of shadows, each one is tethered to something, tangible and real, solid in your grasp.

Yet the homestead does not follow these rules.

The walls bleed with secrets you’ve yet to learn, each groan of the floorboards underneath your gentle footsteps sounds like another pair is following closely behind. Light spills through windows, but  it dies before it reaches the corners, and does not fill the room the way it should.

It’s that morning, one hour into your second investigation, that you smell it—something faint at first that quickly grows stronger, souring the air with each breath you suck in. It’s familiar but unwelcome, the unmistakable stench of decay. Luis notices it too, his nose wrinkling as he glances toward the far end of the hallway.

“Do you smell that?” he asks, his voice quiet.

You nod. 

The smell rots. It festers the further you walk down the hallway, intensifying until it clings to you like a second skin. It seeps through the floorboards, through every crack in splintering wood, and it leads you to a door. The one at the end of the hallway from the night before. The one you didn’t manage to open because he had been there.

Luis nudges you with his elbow. “Ladies first.”

“Very brave,” you mutter, pushing the door open.

Inside, the room is cold, the air heavy with dust. Yellowing and peeling wallpaper lines the walls, a dusty bed in the corner, a dresser by the opposite wall and a wardrobe by the adjacent one.

But what draws your attention are the walls—every inch covered in horrifying jagged scratches, as if something had clawed at the walls in a frenzy of desperation.

N-O-E-L.

The letters are scrawled over and over, the same pattern repeated a millennia of times. They twist and turn, written backwards and mirrored, as if whatever had left them behind had longed for a voice it had forgotten how to use.

“What the hell…” Luis murmurs, stepping closer with his polaroid camera, the shutter sounding as he snaps a few photos of the scratches. “What are we dealing with, the ghost of Christmas past?”

You swallow, admittedly now confused. “What does that even mean?” You muse, walking towards a wall and running your fingers over the splintering wood.

“His name, maybe?” Luis supplies, lifting his head from behind the camera.

Without thinking, you speak. “Is your name Noel?” 

Silence answers.

You decide to move around the room, keen to find answers where your ghost refuses to give them to you. Your fingertips grazing the walls as if you could pull the truth from the cracks in the old plaster.

“I know you did this,” you say, your voice firm but edged with a strange softness, like you’re coaxing something fragile from the dark. “Why won’t you tell me your name?”

The lights flicker. Luis begins to pray.

The stench grows, grows, grows, more potent with each step you take towards the bed. You fear you’ll find rot when you pull the covers back—a body, perhaps. But what you find confuses you more. You fall to your knees by the bed, crane your neck to peer beneath it, and your eyes catch the glint of silver.

Your hand stretches out, inching under the bed as your teeth catch your lip. When you pull the object free, you look up at Luis, who meets your gaze with the same confusion. In your hands you hold a hunting knife.

And as quickly as it had come, the stench subsides.

You turn the knife over in your hand as you push yourself off the dusty floor, a strange emblem is etched into the heel of the blade. 

“Well that’s not weird at all,” Luis mutters, taking the knife from your hand to inspect it himself. You bite the inside of your cheek, about to say something more, when a faint creak draws your attention. The wardrobe. The door swings open, as if nudged by an unseen hand. You meet Luis’ wary gaze, your heart thrumming with anticipation.

Drawn like a moth to a flame, you rise to your feet, walking closer, pulling the door open by its rusting brass handle. Inside hangs a tarnished mirror, and in it you catch your own reflection—dark circles ring your eyes, your reflection looks as drained as you’ve begun to feel.

Luis hums over your shoulder, a spark of realisation lighting his expression as he clicks his tongue. “Not Noel, look.”

You squint into the mirror, making out the jagged inscriptions in the wall that are now mirrored. “Leon?”

There’s a knock on the wall behind you, too loud to be mistaken for the walls of the house adjusting. 

“Is that a yes?” You breathe.

Two knocks.

Luis stares at you, his voice hushed, disbelieving. “Are you talking to a ghost?”

“Holy fuck, I’m talking to a ghost.”

Your ghost isn’t as terrifying with a name to its haunt. Leon, you’ve come to find, is gentle. You and Luis have spent the past three hours communicating with him; knock once for yes, twice for no. A language of patience.

You’ve been documenting it all in your notebooks—entry after entry of everything you’ve learnt. It's all you can do, considering the tapes you’ve tried to record burn out. You figure he doesn’t like the notion of being seen. Being known is different, though. You can feel that—he wants to be known.

He cannot leave.

He doesn’t remember how he got here.

He knows only his name.

You find he also likes to move things.

First, it was the photos. Luis had left the polaroids from the bedroom out on the dining room table to develop, safe with the windows drawn. You’d found them around the house later, one in your bag, another nestled between the equipment. Harmless. Cute, almost.

Then Leon started to move bigger objects. Your torch was found in the bedroom closet, Luis’ lighter in a kitchen cabinet, your hairpins scattered like breadcrumbs on the mantle of the fireplace. It’s a game to him, one that you find yourself eager to indulge. 

You slip into the kitchen, carrying a small wooden figure you’d picked up from the general store—nothing too special, a simple carving of a bluebird. Ghostly fingers might appreciate the weight of its worn edges, you think.

“Alright,” you say aloud, speaking to the empty room, “I – uh, got you something.”

You place the bluebird on the dining table, straightening the figure before taking a few gentle steps back. The temperature in the room drops suddenly, a chilly cold that you no longer mistake for the prairie wind, a denseness in the air that can only be explained by experience. 

Your EMF reader ticks up, and you itch to jot down the reading, yet the moment you turn your back, there’s the sound of wood scraping against wood. You spin back on your heel, only to see that the little bird has moved, facing the window with its beak pointed towards the fading sunlight.

“So you like the bird then?” You nearly laugh, low and under your breath.

There’s another scrape, this time longer. The bird moves again, right before your eyes, closer to the edge of the table.

Despite the absurdity of it all, you continue to talk. “Careful, you’ll knock it off.” You warn softly.

For a moment, nothing happens. Then the bird stops just short of tipping over the edge, as if Leon has taken your words into consideration. You watch as the bird drags back across the table to the centre. 

The lights flicker with your laughter, as if your ghost finds amusement in the cadence of your voice.

You begin to wonder how anyone could’ve thought this home was malevolent at all. The unease that had come with your first encounter has long since given way to something deeper—an ache, a yearning, a quiet desperation to understand. You don’t want to leave. You want to stay, to uncover every secret this house holds. 

How did he die? Was it peaceful, or something violent? What kind of life did he lead? Did he love? Did he lose?

You sit on the living room floor, your back pressed against the wall, clicking your pen twice as you jot down tonight’s meeting in your notebook. From the wall beside you, two soft knocks answer in return.

There is a difference between an architectural haunting and a hereditary one. There’s a certain comfort in knowing a haunting is bound to a place, that its roots lie deep within the dirt that make up the home’s foundation. That it cannot follow you home.

But when a haunting becomes hereditary—when it latches onto you, burrows under your skin, sinks its claws into your soul, twisting, festering—when it’s tethered to you, that's when the fear takes hold. You cannot outrun a hereditary haunting.

Last night, you dreamt again. The homestead, its walls bleeding dark and thick, like wounds seeping into your memory. The flashes came in fragments: the house, the woods, a clearing bathed in moonlight. A glint of a knife to match the gleam of his eyes. And then, the sensation of cold mud pressed against your skin as you lay in the dirt, helpless, hopeless, dead.

You wake in the middle of the night and wonder when this haunting stopped feeling architectural.

Luis finds you on the third day in the parlour, your fingers curled around the edge of an old, weather-beaten box. It drags across the warped floorboards with a groan, sending up a small cloud of dust. 

He pauses in the doorway. “What are you doing?” His voice cuts through the otherwise quiet home. 

“Cleaning up.” You keep your eyes on the box, focused as you rifle through its contents.

Luis steps further into the room, his boots crunching on the debris-strewn floor, nearly tripping over the marbles you had laid out earlier for Leon to move. “Cleaning up?” His brow furrows. “Jesus, I thought we were here to investigate.”

“We are,” you mutter, your hands brushing off the dust clinging to your clothes as you turn to face him. “I’m just helping out.”

“Helping out?” Luis stops mid-step, his confusion sharpening. “Helping the ghost?”

Your hands still. The air shifts, colder than before, almost as if something is standing beside you. You glance over your shoulder, but it’s just Luis, a mix of disbelief and frustration in his gaze.

“Yes, Luis,” You sound annoyed now. Tension thick in the air.

His laugh is short and bitter. “This is crazy,” he mutters, his voice rising slightly. “You’re growing too - too attached, we need to leave.”

“No.” You straighten up, the words more defensive than you intend. “He needs help. Look at the state of this place!” You gesture to the peeling wallpaper, the broken furniture scattered, the oppressive sense of neglect.

“He?” Luis tries to be your voice of reason, tethering you back to reality, to the here and now because currently you seem like you’re in a different plane of existence entirely. 

“Yes, he.” You drag the box into a corner, your back to him, and run your hand across its lid. The texture feels wrong—too damp, too cold, as if the cardboard itself is rotting from the inside. “He’s trapped here,” you murmur, more to yourself than to Luis. “I don’t know how long, but... it’s been years. He doesn’t even have anyone to mourn him.”

Luis exhales sharply, his breath fogging the air. When did it get so cold? “You don’t know that,” he snaps, his voice louder, louder, louder. “You don’t even know who ‘he’ is!”

The words hit you like a slap. Something shifts, as if the chain binding his anchor to your ship has snapped and broken all at once.

“I’m not—” You stop, swallowing the words. “I’m not crazy, Luis.”

You can see the flicker of regret in his eyes, the way his expression softens, but it doesn’t erase the sting of his words. He hesitates, lowering his voice as if it could take back the hurt.

“I didn’t say that,” he murmurs, “But you’re not thinking straight. You haven’t been since that night. The ghost—or whatever it is—has you hooked. And you don’t even see it–”

Each word feels like a knife twisting deeper. The betrayal coils inside you, bitter and raw. You trusted him to believe in you, to see you, even when no one else did. You open your mouth to argue, but your ghost has better timing.

A sudden, violent knocking echoes through the house, an urgency to each rap. This time, it’s not coming from within the walls, and oddly, that unsettles you more than if it were. The sound pounds from the front door, growing louder, louder, louder with each second that passes. When both you and Luis rush to the foyer, you stare blankly as the door handle rattles on its own.

You don’t think when you walk forward, as if compelled by an unseen force, your hand wrapping around the crystal handle before twisting it and tugging it open. There, crumpled on the porch, lies a bird.

It’s ruined. Feather slicked by a sheen of its own blood, some still fluttering in the wind, others matted to exposed bone. The body is split open, like something had torn it apart with its bare hands, its innards spilt on the rotting boards. Thin ropes of intestine, wet and glistening, loop over themselves. 

The head, nearly severed, hangs at a grotesque angle, twisted so far back it looks as though it were straining to see something beyond its reach, connected by just a thin sinew of flesh. One of its glassy black eyes remains open, dull and lifeless, its beak parted in a scream that never came.

The bird has blue feathers. A bluebird, you realise.

Leon doesn’t speak much the rest of the day—if you can qualify the knocks and the flickers of light as speech at all. When you ask him about the bluebird, there's only silence. When you press him on whether he caused it, a vase shatters like fallen stars at your feet.

Perhaps he’s not all gentle. Neither are you, though, so you give him grace. You pick up the shards of glass one by one, wrap them up in a handkerchief, and discard them in the garden. 

It’s only when you return inside that you realise you’re bleeding. A thin line of red trails from the split in your thumb, the sting arrives after, delayed but insistent. You watch it drip, swirling with the water as you rinse it away, the crimson draining down the sink.

You’ve grown used to seeing Leon in your periphery. His shadow is a presence that has grown comforting. Unknown to know, unfamiliar to familiar. You find yourself looking forward to the night even more now, eager for a glimpse of him. But tonight, he doesn’t visit.

You think you might’ve upset him. Between the dead bird and the silence, maybe he didn’t like all the arguing, how loud the house had gotten today. You don’t blame him. 

“Luis wants to leave tomorrow,” You hum softly into the darkness. You don’t need to see Leon to know he’ll be listening. “I have to go with him.”

Silence.

“I’ll miss you,” You try again, your voice holding a sense of urgency. Please, please, please.

Again, silence.

You ignore the tears that prick at your eyes, upset that your ghost is ignoring you. You fall asleep with a headache and a heartache to match. But when you dream that night, it’s much more alarming than any of the ones before.

You wake in the darkness, your body stiff in your dream like you’ve lost your flesh and have been made up of bones. Rigor mortis once more. For a second you think this might be some sort of horrible sleep paralysis,but before the panic can set in, your eyes focus on the cracks of light in your vision, seeping through the darkness of your mind.

You’re not sure what part of your brain comes to the conclusion, but you realise you’re stuck under something, in something maybe. A coffin? Something wooden. You can smell the musk of the cottonwood.

When you wake from the dream, your headache is pounding twice as hard, you sit up, groaning as you press a hand to your head. When your eyes open, your breath catches in your throat. 

Leon.

He's there. Right there.

Closer than he’s ever dared to get, standing beside your bed, watching, waiting, like he always is. Yet, he looks more solid, more here than you’d ever seen of him before. You could make out the shape of his nose, the curve of his eyes, the length of his lashes.

Your heart beats wildly in your chest, bated breath caught in the cavern of your throat as you try to comprehend what you’re seeing. 

“Leon,” you whisper his name, your voice shaky, barely more than a breath.

He doesn’t move, but his eyes soften, just slightly, a weight behind his gaze that you can’t quite place. You watch his chest rise and fall with breath that should not be there, lungs that have no reason to expand, a heart that doesn’t beat. And yet, yet, he is here, in front of you, as vivid as anyone else would be.

You lift your hand, your fingers trembling as they hover just above his cheek. You know he isn’t real, not in the way you are, but in this moment, he feels real enough. The heat of your skin, the cool air between you—it all blurs together until the only thing you are sure of is him.

Slowly, carefully, your fingertips brush his skin.

It is faint—barely a touch at all, like reaching through fog—but it is there. For a second, maybe less, his skin feels solid beneath your fingers, cold but tangible. The breath catches in your throat as your hand lingers, the boundary between life and death blurring, blurring, blurring. His eyes flutter closed. 

But then, just as quickly, the sensation is gone. Your fingers slip through air, the chill of the room returning, and he is nothing more than a ghost again.

No, no, no your mind screams. A desperation in the way you reach for him again only to feel nothing. A hand over his chest is merely a hand in mid-air. You cannot feel the beat of his undead heart.

Yet, the weight of his gaze remains, heavy with something you cannot name. You want more. You want him to stay. You want to stay.

Leon’s lips part, the faintest hint of a breath escaping, and you swear you can almost hear him say something. Almost. His hand twitches, as if he is also trying to reach for you, but can’t quite cross the divide.

It is unbearable, the way you see him see you. 

You don’t tell Luis of what happened last night, refuse to unravel the complexities of the ache in your being that cannot be satiated anymore. 

It’s not pain exactly—at least not the kind Luis would understand. It’s deeper than that, a longing you can’t explain. You’re stuck here, you realise, tethered not by chains but by something far less visible, yet much harder to sever. 

Luis frowns when you tell him to go without you, that you’ll follow in a day or two. He doesn’t believe you, not entirely. There is scepticism in the way he argues, but you don’t have much fight left anymore. Maybe there isn’t in him, either.

You’d promised yourself this was temporary—a few nights, maybe a week—just long enough to get the evidence you needed. But those days had unravelled into something else. You couldn’t say when you’d first realised you weren’t going to leave. Maybe it was when the lights began to flicker in time with your heartbeat, or when the chill of the air began to feel like a ghost of a touch on your skin.

There was no evidence to gather anymore. No story left to tell but this one.

And perhaps, you think, that’s always been the truth of you—this love of yours, spilling over the edges of your heart until it found something, someone, to hold onto. Living or dead, it didn’t seem to matter. Love for you has never needed a pulse, just a presence.

You walk through the homestead, the familiar creak of the floorboards beneath your feet, and find that the air no longer feels heavy. There’s no longer that crushing weight on your chest, no musk of decay hanging like a warning. You breathe, and for the first time, the house feels still.

"Leon?" you call, your voice fragile, unsure.

The lights flicker in response, faint and distant.

Maybe, you think, this house has always been your grave.

likes n reblogs r very much appreciated <3

[sweeterthanficstion]

ik ive already written a ghost fic but what abt leon who moves into a haunted house and oh noooo the ghost haunting the place is super pretty....

[sweeterthanficstion]

leon kennedy really effs with pregnant women i think like i’m glad that we’ve collectively agreed that he’d be infatuated with u during pregnancy bcs literally what part of that man wouldn’t be into heavier tits & tummy like matter of fact i think he’d rather die than cheat on his pregnant wife but if he was single & he met a pregnant woman with a shitty husband he very well could end up in an affair LMAOO

[sweeterthanficstion]

every day i think of older leon who baby traps you cuz hes too scared youll leave him for someone better

[sweeterthanficstion]

i need to teach older leon how to use the internet

[sweeterthanficstion]

Older!Leon muttering "damn kid who taught you how to do that" when a younger!reader sucks him off

[sweeterthanficstion]

you guys gotta forgive me for how much dialogue im writing but their banter is SO FUN

[sweeterthanficstion]

thank youuuu for all the love on all the right reasons !!!!! i know i said knight!leon would be next but... im a stinky liar n a fraud (as usual) and ive gotten a few more ideas for rockstar!leon so hoping to get that all done for u before knight!leon :)

[sweeterthanficstion]

hiiii quick reminder that this blog is 18+ and if you dont have your age in bio or somewhere on your blog i will be blocking 🫶

[sweeterthanficstion]

nickelback on the playlist is sooo real

no because!!! all the right reasons is sooo rockstar leon, like that entire album is exactly what his discography sounds like to me.... sex.. drugs... more sex.. thats all he writes about

[sweeterthanficstion]

I’m in love with you

making out with u sloppy ilysm