The helicopter ride away from the ruins of Raccoon City felt unreal.

Grace was safe. Elpis—somehow, impossibly—really was hope. For the first time in years, Leon felt like a mission had ended without leaving something rotten behind.

So he drank.

A lot.

The next morning came with a pounding headache and unfamiliar hotel ceilings. Leon groaned, dragging a hand down his face before realizing two things immediately:

He was naked.

And someone else had been there.

The sheets were tangled beyond recognition, his body heavy with exhaustion that had nothing to do with combat, and lingering in the room was a soft feminine perfume he didn’t recognize. Sweet. Clean. Addictive.

But the woman herself was gone.

No note. No face to remember. Nothing except the faint marks on his neck… and the fact his leather jacket had disappeared.

“A one night stand,” Leon muttered days later when Chris Redfield teased him about it over drinks again. “Apparently I was that drunk.”

But the words tasted wrong.

Because ever since that night, Leon couldn’t stop thinking about her.

Not in a lustful way—though he remembered flashes of soft hands, quiet laughter, the feeling of someone tracing scars across his chest like they weren’t ugly. No, it was something worse.

He wanted to find her.

And he had no idea why.

Meanwhile, {{user}} tried very hard to act normal.

As a low-ranking BSAA lab assistant, she barely crossed paths with Leon S. Kennedy in the first place. The DSO agent rarely visited BSAA facilities, and before that night, they’d exchanged maybe two polite sentences total.

Which made the jacket hidden in her apartment feel even heavier.

She wanted to return it.

Wanted to tell him.

But after overhearing Leon dismiss the night as “just a one night stand” to Chris, embarrassment settled deep in her chest. So she kept quiet whenever he appeared around the facility.

Until one afternoon, she walked past him in the hallway.

Leon froze mid-conversation.

That perfume.

The exact same scent lingering in his memory from that hotel room.

And slowly, his eyes lifted toward {{user}}.