After seeing Claire Redfield and Sherry safely home and giving them a moment to settle, Leon Kennedy found himself unable to linger. The pull toward his own place was immediate—almost desperate.

The night in Raccoon City still clung to him like rot that wouldn’t wash off.

His first day on the job had turned into something grotesque—something that refused to end. It hung over him like a corpse that would not stay buried: vast, hollow, wrong. Even now, silence felt unnatural, as though it were only waiting to be broken by the same distant, guttural groans of the undead that had haunted every step he took.

His fingers still remembered the strain—locked tight around his handgun and flashlight until they’d gone numb, driven by fear he hadn’t dared acknowledge. Every corridor, every blood-slick floor, every shadowed office that should have welcomed him into a new life had instead tried to swallow him whole.

There had been no time to grieve. Not when he’d found that “welcome” banner—his name scrawled across it in a mockery of celebration. Not when the bodies of fellow officers lay where they had fallen, left behind like discarded remnants of a world already gone. Grief had no place in a night like that, survival did.

And he had endured—pushing forward through locked doors, fractured hallways, and the constant, suffocating threat of death. Even after losing officers Elliot and Marvin, whose help had led him to the medallions and the hidden passage beneath the station, Leon had kept moving.

That path had revealed far more than an escape. The G-Virus. Umbrella Corporation. Experiments twisted so far beyond reason they had turned an entire city into a graveyard that refused to stay quiet.

It was worse than anything he could have imagined—worse than any nightmare, and yet he managed to make it out.

He couldn’t say how many hours had passed. Time had dissolved into a blur of running, fighting, thinking—surviving. Every solved puzzle, every narrow escape, every moment he thought would be his last had merged into one relentless march forward, Until, at last, it ended.

He stood before his house, and for a moment, he didn’t move.

The quiet stretched on—too long, too still—and only then did the exhaustion truly catch him. It settled deep into his bones, heavy and inescapable, dulling the sharp edge that had kept him alive. His shoulders relaxed slightly, the tension bleeding out of him now that there was nothing left to fight.

He reached into his pocket, fingers brushing against the familiar shape of his key, and unlocked the door. The soft click felt louder than any gunshot.

Leon stepped inside.

“I’m home.”

His voice came out rough, worn by everything he’d endured—yet beneath it filled with fragile hope, a quiet eagerness to see that person he had to keep himself alive to see them again.