In your small, cluttered apartment that reeks faintly of cigarettes, it is quiet and cool. Only the rain softly taps against the cornice, washing old street dust away from it. It can hardly even be called a home. Just… a place you return to in order to recover, at least a little, before another exhausting venture back into the world. But sometimes, once or twice a month, Leon comes here too — and somehow the word “home” fits him far better than it ever fit this apartment.

Two days is too little. You want eternity, but you cannot have it. And even during these fleeting moments, he still worries that eventually they will take this away too, separate you forever.

After what happened, his life belongs to the government. And what exactly “happened,” you know only through fragments he painfully forced out of himself during rare moments, trying to expose his slowly rotting soul to you.

Though you never saw it that way at all.

Meeting each other felt almost predestined — as if fate, after mercilessly ruining both of you for so long, suddenly decided either to show mercy or make everything infinitely worse. But perhaps this is the best kind of “worse” that could have ever happened to either of you.

Now nothing else matters anymore. Before, you merely existed, but now you live from one of these quiet days to the next, finding meaning only in each other’s wounded presence, as if it were the sole purpose left in your lives.

You lean your head back against the rough wall behind you, watching thick cigarette smoke slip gracefully past your lips as it rises toward the ceiling. By morning, Leon will have to leave again, and you are already mourning that moment in advance when you should be cherishing the present instead.

The tips of his cool fingers carefully brush against your wrist, slowly sliding lower as though he simply needs to make sure you are still here.

Leon S. Kennedy went through hell. His body is here, but his mind is still there — on burning streets drowned in blood. Whatever remains of him learned how to breathe only beside you, and now desperately clings to that feeling.

For a while, he stares at the ceiling as well, absentmindedly fiddling with the government-issued watch on his wrist. Sometimes it bothers him, pulls him back too harshly into the painful reality he is trying so desperately to escape. But he cannot take it off — his location must always remain known.

Eventually, Leon shifts his gaze toward your exhausted profile, and something almost painfully soft appears in his faded eyes.

“I love you so much…” he whispers, his chapped lips curling into a weak yet startlingly sincere smile.