Just Time

A/N: Like I said at the start of Inclination, I don't intend to start these stories all the time. Sometimes they just happen. This one is another one of those. This story has NOTHING to do with any other Resident Evil continuity I'm writing currently.

I know I can be pretty subtle with some of my details. In the interest of making things clearer, I'm adding the year at the top of the copy for the story. Please PAY ATTENTION TO THAT.

EDIT: So I realized the year wasn't up on here. So I had to re-upload. Many apologies.

2023

The noise was quiet, but the house was still. Claire was awake in an instant. Even after twenty years, soft noises in the night woke her. Her husband was … had been very accepting of that. If it bothered him that his wife was often up, making coffee at quarter to two with a gun on the counter, he said nothing.

It was one of the reasons she married him. David was steady, dependable.

And David was there.

To say that he was the first person in her heart would have been a lie. To say that he was the only person in her heart would have been a lie. She couldn't even say that he was the most constant person in her life. Claire had met David at twenty-nine, just over ten years ago. She was thirty-two when they got married.

It had taken that long for him to convince her that his love was quiet, and tolerant, and that even if he couldn't understand her (which had been a large argument against him), he was more than capable of supporting her.

She couldn't expect David to pick up a gun to do it, but being the vigilant one in the house was not the worst thing she could think of.

Not when David was so good about everything else.

There had been a long, long discussion involving the situation with the key. In their coexistence, it was one of the few things that David had been unable to swallow when she first admitted it to him. It had been a hard thing to say, especially when he was so good about things. When he was so good at waiting until he was allowed and then wrapping her up in his concern.

In a way, David's concern had been what forced her to calm down. He was so worried about her, so conscious of her. It would have been criminal not to react well towards him, not to stop panicking and put the gun down, not to come out of the bathroom or the closet.

So she had hated to admit it to him, when she did, but she had.

Leon had a key to her house.

A key he was never required to give back.

Even reasonable David had words to say about that. About how it looked when his girlfriend… his fiancée let other men have keys to her place, knew the code on the alarm. Even reasonable David took the normal conclusion to it.

Her temper had responded, and the ring had been thrown. If she was cheating on him, he didn't mean that ring, did he? If she was having some long, drawn out affair with a secret agent, getting married would just be some sort of cover, wouldn't it?

It was a failing in his support. It was something he needed to understand.

But he couldn't.

They'd gotten married anyway. David's stipulation to not changing the locks on the house was to add a new one. He knew Claire, knew what she was like with the storm shutters and the double front and rear doors to the place. If there was a lock to secure, before she went to bed, she secured it.

There was a deadbolt on the master bedroom door.

One that she turned, then, after sliding from bed and retrieving her sidearm as she went to inspect the rest of the house.

Other than that, and a few canceled business trips, David was reasonable, steady. He was boring.

In a life that occasionally offered near-poisonous floods of adrenaline, boring was preferable to normal. She and David had been happy.

Happy until the day he hadn't come home.

Her safe, boring banker never made it home from work one evening. A clockwork man, whose life ran on cogs – cogs tuned to her schedule and her eccentricities – was late one day.

Late forever.

It had caused a numbed out feeling in Claire, raised paranoia. Kidnapped? No, that wasn't reasonable, she told herself the whole time she waited up. Mugged? Possible, her husband wasn't the most imposing man there could be.

Her mind, absent of his lighthouse to brighten it, told her before she got the phone call what happened.

Dead.

A car wreck, or something, Claire couldn't remember at times like this, times when she would normally have told him to lock the door behind her and be ready to call the police. Times when the adrenaline quickened her pulse and she breathed more shallow.

Everyone had come back to her, after that. The ones that had found distance soothing. Even the close ones that had been forced to take space. And the only thing she could think to say or ask any of them was – did I make David happy?

Chris, at first, had no answer for her. His eyes told the story that his lips wouldn't say. Loss affected her brother terribly. Jill's return had saved him from wasting away, but even her continued presence, their reunion… it wasn't enough to heal away the two and a half years he'd anguished without her. Every time Chris lost someone it was like the first time. He was thirteen again and the police were packing them both into a squad car to take them down to the hospital, but it was too late. And Chris was still standing there tall, jaw set against the tears that threatened so that she'd be ok. Claire didn't really blame Jill for her brother's inability to respond to her question, not normally. But in the numb, questioning emptiness of the funeral preparations, she did.

Her brother had been opposed to her marriage to David anyway, at the beginning. Over time, Chris had warmed up to his brother-in-law, but there was an obvious, almost critical failure of understanding between them. David tried, he really did, but he was not good with family members. He'd been an only child, himself, and was raised by a single-mother. Claire's baggage was the right kind for him, because there wasn't a ton of people to consult about her, when something happened. It was good for him.

So that was her brother's answer to her catatonic question.

He picked you because you were good for him.

Jill, after the twinge of anger she'd felt, was more helpful. She did not have the loss burned into the walls of her that Chris did. She had the weight of struggle. When Claire asked, as her sister-in-law was helping her to lay out his clothes for the viewing, Jill's answer had been more simple.

David loved you, and love makes you happy, along with other things. But he stayed, and only happy people stay.

Carefully, as she finished checking the upper floor, Claire pulled the safety from the gun. Her bare legs felt cool. The thermostat was still set the way David liked it, no change in two years from what had been before for so long. At night the system turned itself off. Cold or hot set in that was warmed or cooled away shortly before the start of the active morning.

The clock had said three-forty-seven. That meant almost three hours before the heater would start to inch back on.

Bare feet took the stairs one at a time, carefully.

Slowly.

The back staircase was the one she took, the one that let out near the rear door at the pass through from the study to the kitchen, just beside the laundry.

A soft noise again drew her attention, and Claire checked the study briefly before sweeping her gun into the kitchen doorway. She didn't turn on the light to blind herself, this was her house, and she knew it better than whoever came in. She didn't need the light to make out something different in her kitchen.

The figure, the person, was crouched near the refrigerator, almost like tying a shoe.

"Alright," Claire said, "stand up slow."

The figure, obviously male, complied with her directions, hands lifting. It was as the gesture was made complete that she recognized the silhouette in the darkness.

"So, do you want the key back? It's been years since you pulled a gun on me." His voice was still smooth, after so many years, but lower, deepened with age and a hundred hurts he didn't talk about to much of anyone. "Can I turn around, or are you going to plug one into me for that?"

Leon.

Claire reset the safety on her Browning, heaving a sigh of relief, and leaned her shoulder into the doorframe.

How could she forget?

David. She'd been thinking about David.

It didn't stop, even with him across the kitchen from her. Leon stepped out of his work boots, grunting as he did so, and pulled the refrigerator open. He was still wearing his jacket, and she could see the gear still strapped to him.

"Bleeding?" Claire asked him.

"Not too much," Leon replied. "I hadn't gotten to the minor disinfecting yet. They shot me full of antibiotics before the plane."

"I'll get the stuff."

Turning from the kitchen while he rooted through her fridge, Claire made her way to the first floor bathroom, liberating her post-op first aide kit. It wasn't the same as the one she kept in the kitchen, the one for minor things like burns and the accidental knife wounds David had been prone to, even though she never seemed to slip. This one she'd put together years back and kept stocked afterwards for times like these.

David had been the one to show her how to check the expiration dates on things. Wagering under his breath once that she'd be more upset if she did harm to Leon because of negligence than… he'd never finished the sentence.

Kneeling to retrieve the toolbox, Claire's heart felt heavy. So heavy she couldn't lift herself from the spot, let alone the toolbox full of medical supplies.

Her thoughts turned to Leon, Leon and his dedication to the job, Leon and his sacrificing everything for his goals, everything but her. Even letting go of what could have dragged him down. Tabitha, with the wide brown eyes and the hopeful smile on her lips. The halting, bashful admission on Leon's part that she was pregnant. Claire's heart had just about stopped, but she didn't blame Leon, she couldn't blame him. And then when she'd gotten the call from the hospital. Gotten the call before he had because he was out on a mission and had listed her as an emergency contact before either set of parents that might be worried…

David hadn't argued then. She assumed David felt Tabitha was a comrade, another outsider worming her way into an unknown situation. Tabitha had relaxed David about the subject of Leon and his key to their house, that and the years of knowing just what the key was for.

Both of them had gone to the hospital, collected the woman's effects, and started making phone calls.

Her family had taken the body back home. Claire attended the funeral, David unable to take off to join her, and Leon still unreachable on his mission. No, David didn't have a problem with him after that. Not even when Claire bullied him into taking his bereavement leave as a guilt-wracked member of their small household. Not when she'd had to find the words to make better for him what years would have him making better for her.

Claire could not remember what words had left her lips to help him, but they had the same pain in Tabitha's loss, even though they were not the same to her when she was alive.

Leon's quiet response from that numb, empty week of hers came back to her. That she could remember, though sometimes the comfort of it left her. His approach to her was different than the others, different even than David's would have been. They were partners, though, and they knew things people couldn't understand. They understood in a way that even her husband hadn't. In a way he'd admitted Tabitha had never tried.

He was late, coming, but Claire didn't worry when Leon was late the way she worried when David was. Leon's dependability did not hinge on his punctuality. His smile was won, not expected, and his presence was a gift rather than the ticking of a clock.

She was seated, alone, in the kitchen, having coffee with her Browning when he came in. The last of the people coming to the calling hours at the house were gone, and there were dishes of food, casserole and different sized baking dishes all around. Claire was not surprised by it, or the fact that it was all David's kind of food. The calling hours had been attended by his sort of people. His coworkers and subordinates at the bank, some of his long-term clients. Classmates he had from college and a few from high school. Claire even saw one of his ex-girlfriends, and had to shake her hand.

They had all seemed unsurprised to see Claire pale, dry-eyed, and unresponsive.

Chris and Jill had made the calling hours, but to the people who came, the ones who tried to play family with her, she seemed poor in relations. David's mother had finally ushered them all out. The steel haired woman was a force to be reckoned with. She knew her daughter-in-law felt the loss. And she wouldn't hear a word otherwise, once snapping at one of the attendees that they hadn't been David's wife, and couldn't know her grief.

Silently, at that point, Claire had admitted to herself that they couldn't know her guilt.

That was the numbness, the questioning. In the wake of it all, she couldn't know if any of it had been real between them. David didn't seem real, he was a concept, a victim. He was gone, like she had to tell herself the zombies she had faced were gone – no longer human.

She couldn't cry.

So she'd sat down to drink her coffee in a kitchen full of food she hadn't been able to taste, and stared at her gun.

She didn't even pick it up when the back door opened and Leon came in. Her eyes felt dry and slow as she turned them on him, taking in his expression.

The look on his face had been a knowing one, an understanding one… but most of all it was an accepting one. It was similar, if not more pained than the expression he had given her when she told him she was marrying David. No, this was more pain than even that.

Crossing the kitchen, he'd come up behind her and enveloped her in a hug. It was intoxicating, and drowsying. Claire slumped, then, the cold, stiffness of numbness thawing at the warmth of the body wrapping itself around her.

For the first time, she had felt the urge to cry. She felt allowed to cry. David… her life with him, herself with him, was content but restrained. She was functional, but she deadened.

Leon had pointed as much out to her when she asked, mischievously, if he wore that pained look because he'd lost her to some other man's bed. His answer had been simple. No, he'd said. I can't lose you to him the way that matters, I'm worried you're going to lose yourself. Stay Claire, he'd said.

Claire had never seen more than a few phrases pass between Leon and her husband. At the wedding, Leon had smiled at her and congratulated her. He'd shaken David's hand, a firmly, man-shake that she was proud of him for, and he'd wished him a happy life. Leon had wished David a happy marriage with Claire.

A drunk Chris later told her that Leon was a better choice for her, probably a better man.

But Leon wasn't there.

His grip on her shoulders was with her, his warmth against her back, his thoughts were always present, and his concern, but… Dependable as he was, trustworthy as he was, Claire could not touch him to reassure herself. Her friend was a great one, and it was a friendship she'd never let go of. When she married David, she locked it up like that. She locked up her care for Leon, the way she needed him to make her worst days bearable, and the one night when… All of it she sealed up.

And just like he'd worried, she lost a part of herself when she did.

The words had tumbled out of her mouth before she'd known she was saying them. Did I make David happy?

Leon gripped her tighter, hands squeezing her arms, and let his head hang over her shoulder. It was like he was burning the warmth into her, doing that. And when he spoke, his voice was low and steady against her ear.

You're forgetting the good things, Claire. How you two laughed, and… went to baseball games. He used to trip on your dress at New Year's parties, but you liked it because he never bothered to get the tuxedo pants shortened enough. And… you two knew how to smile.

She'd closed her eyes against his words, afraid of them, afraid of remembering what he was saying… in case it wasn't true, in case Leon was lying to her. But she knew he wouldn't. He was so close, and she couldn't deny the words that he kept speaking.

You brought that man to life, and I'm not going to let you worry about this, or hurt about not having done enough. He was happy. He told me.

There felt, in that instant, like there were words that neither of them were speaking, like there was more that needed to come out. But the tears had come instead.

The tears had lasted the evening, even when Leon put her upstairs to bed, promising to sit outside the door in case she needed him, and the following days. She could barely see for them at the funeral, and at the grave side it had taken both Leon and Chris to get her up when she fell heavily to her knees.

In the bathroom, now, she closed her fingers around the handle of the kit, and got to her feet on her own.

The stale, empty feeling, the dryness in her throat was gone.

She carried the kit to the kitchen and found Leon making a sandwich.

Turning on the light, she saw what the darkness had concealed from her. There was blood on the floor. Blood on the floor and down one of his pant legs, from a cut in his leg.

Adrenaline surged again. The Browning fell to the floor on one side, the toolbox med kit on the other. She didn't hear the noise either made as they fell.

Claire's feet carried her across the room to him, and she snatched him by the gear on his belt, pulling him back against her.

"Cla-?!" Leon managed to garble out as her arms circled his middle tightly. "What-?"

Shaking. Her whole body was shaking, and she was afraid to let go in case tears were on the other side of the shakes. So she held on tightly to him and pressed her face against the back of his neck.

"Don't lie to me," she said in an angry, tight voice.

He shifted, and from his startled look at his leg, Claire knew that he probably hadn't even noticed it. One hand lowered, and he touched the hole in his pant leg, fingers coming back wet and red. She knew it without having to look. "It was closed… must've dragged the scar wrong," he explained in a soft voice. "Calm down, I'm not dead."

The words were reassuring, smooth and gentle, as though saying them too loud might hurt her or take back their meaning. His clean hand covered hers on his middle, squeezing her fingers where they were threaded over and through each other.

If it were David, he would stand still, wait for her to move so he knew it was safe. But Leon was not David. The strong hand covering hers loosened her grip enough so that he could turn, and both arms slid around her, pulling her against him fully, guiding her face against the curve of his neck. Claire tightened her fingers in his jacket.

"We need to get you patched," she said in a weak, empty voice. "Your leg…"

"Will do for a bit. This needs done more," Leon replied, cheek pressing against her temple.

Words escaped her for a while, and Claire closed her eyes, leaning into him fully. One hand continued to cradle her head, the other made slow, warm strokes against her back.

Again her legs felt cold, but it was a different cold than the one on the stairs. That locked up thing… the part of herself she'd sealed away was loose. The memories of David, the fond ones and the worried ones all hushed themselves as she remembered other things, things from far longer ago.

And she compared her memories.

Some sort of comparison was inevitable.

Many things her late husband had been, passionate was not high on the list of adjectives that she would ever use to describe him. Not the way she could be… not the way Leon could be… not the way they could be on each other.

He didn't understand the same urgency they could feel, not until just before release. What was that line from Carrie? A whole lot of rubbing for a little bit of warmth.

Why it popped into her head now, in the kitchen, so late at night, Claire couldn't know. It wasn't the sort of thought to have. Even given the color of her mental comparisons, it was unreasonable.

Neither of them were the young, desperate versions of themselves that had experienced that evening together – either in Raccoon City or the one that had followed a few weeks after, desperately hushing each other to keep from waking Sherry.

It was a different lifetime, there was so much between then and now.

The gear on Leon's belt dug into her, making it less than ideal to lean against him, and reminding Claire that this couldn't be comfortable for him either. Her grip loosened, and she expected the reaction she always got when she did so. She expected Leon to loose her and for the two of them to get back to the business of the moment.

He took a deep breath, and Claire shifted her face to look up at him. The hand on the back of her head moved to her cheek, and his thumb stroked her cheekbone a moment as his eyes wandered down to her face. He watched her for a long moment, almost like he was testing her expression, or memorizing her face from that distance, and then his face came closer, and his lips pressed to hers.

Stubbornly, as her body melted against his, fingers curling in the worn leather of his jacket, Claire tried to remind herself that he needed medical attention.

Leon didn't seem to care, for the moment. When she sank against his chest, his head tilted slightly, and he parted his lips against hers.

His hair brushed her face, but Claire barely noticed it. Her lips parted to his kiss, and she found she could barely feel the gear digging into her hips as she leaned more fully against him. This was what kissing was supposed to be like, her mind supplied, almost in subtitle to the whole act. Leon's tongue pressed into her mouth in the kiss. The hand rubbing her back pushed the fabric of her nightshirt up until his palm could spread across the bare skin of her back.

His touch was warm.

It felt like a delicious eternity of warmth. His fingers stroked her ribcage, cupped her cheek, and Claire gripped his jacket for dear life. Bleeding, she tried to remind herself, but it only came out as a weak voice in an otherwise occupied mind.

When he pulled his lips from hers, Claire was shaking again, panting for the breath he'd stolen from her. Her eyes lifted, finding his through the same haircut he'd had for years, the one with the gray just starting to show through the sandy brown that threatened to hide his eyes from her.

A part of her wanted to ask what brought this on, but another part of her knew better. That part, the released, woken part, knew just what it was and why it was. There wasn't an answer to what brought it on worth speaking. There was twenty years of understanding, survival, and dead spouses between them.

It was just time.