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On the day that Leon turns 40 years old, he wakes up warm in bed to the smell of bacon cooking in the kitchen.
Having gone to bed in an empty house last night, his first instinct should have been panic, followed by grabbing his gun and going to scare the life out of whoever thought it was funny to break in and cook his food. But it isn’t.
“MAN!” Chris’s voice shouts from the kitchen, louder than the music he’s blasting. “I feel like a woman!”
“No fucking way,” Leon snorts, throwing his blankets off and scrambling out of bed. The floor vibrates a little from the sheer power of the music. Thank fuck he’s on the bottom floor of the apartment complex.
There are two things he can’t believe about this scenario. One: Chris is back and didn’t tell him he was coming. Two: Chris is cooking in his kitchen, not only blasting Shania Twain, but singing along with her.
Chris stands at the stove, swinging his hips back and forth to the beat. He’s mostly humming to the song, but every time it comes back to ‘Man! I feel like a woman’ he shouts it at the top of his lungs, and for at least a minute all Leon can do is stand in his kitchen doorway and stare, grinning from ear to ear.
I love this fucking dork, he thinks.
“What’re you doing, loser?” he demands once the song ends and Linkin Park starts. Truly an eclectic playlist. Chris jumps and spins around, hand reflexively going to his waist for a gun that isn’t there. Seeing Leon, he grins and grabs his phone to turn the music off and tosses it carelessly back on the counter. “You’re gonna give me a noise complaint.”
“BIRTHDAY BOY!” Chris bellows, throwing his arms wide as he slides over Leon’s always kinda slippery tile floor in his socked feet to grab Leon in a rib-crushing hug. His spine pops deliciously in a few places, right where he’d been needing it cracked for days. “How’s my old man doing today?”
Chris smells like gunpowder, leather, and sweat. He must have come straight here from whatever op he was on; his work clothes are likely already in the laundry waiting to be washed. Leon presses his nose into Chris’s throat and takes a second to just breathe him in, reacquainting himself. It’s been too long.
“You’re older than I am, fuckwit,” he says eventually. “Why am I the old man?”
“Because you’re finally forty! Welcome to the club.”
“What’s my prize for joining?”
They pull apart. With Chris grinning from ear to ear, looking at Leon like he’s something precious (which definitely does not make Leon’s heart flutter), Leon can only tilt his chin up for a kiss that Chris happily obliges. It’s still so strange, yet so nice, to be wanted in the way that Chris wants him.
“Bad back pain, shitty knees, and a penchant for telling schoolkids to get the fuck off our lawns.”
“Huh, I already have two out of three.” Is that smoke Leon smells? “Need a lawn worth yelling at kids over though. Know where I can get one?”
“I have a few ideas.”
“Mmm. Well, while you’re mulling it over, do you maybe wanna save the bacon? That shit’s fucking expensive.”
Chris whips around. “Shit!”
Leon watches in amusement as Chris grabs a pair of tongs as he lifts the frying pan off the stove, quickly dumping the slightly blackened bacon onto a plate covered in a thick wad of paper towels to catch the grease.
“You’re lucky I like my bacon crispy, Redfield.”
“You know what? Go sit at the table,” Chris snaps without heat. He points the tongs at said table. “You’re a distraction. I was gonna surprise you with breakfast in bed, but now look what you made me do.”
Grinning, Leon obliges. “Oh sure, blame the birthday boy.”
“Oh, I will.” The words are low and ominous but followed up with a bright, cheerful, “Hey, how do you like your eggs?”
“Sunny side up.”
“Sunny side up it is!” Chris cracks an egg into the frying pan he just saved the bacon from. “And if you notice any eggshells in your breakfast, no you didn’t.”
Leon snorts, shaking his head a little. What a dork.
They lapse into comfortable silence. Pulling out his phone, Leon scrolls through some of his apps, checking his emails but finding nothing important, listening to Chris hum to Rammstein as breakfast crackles in the frying pan.
His phone chimes with a text.
HUNNIGAN 8:13 AM
Happy birthday, Leon! I
assume you won’t be into
work today, no doubt Chris
will keep you busy. So, I shall
hold onto your present until
I see you next. Cheers to 40
years, and may you have 40 more!
Love, Ingrid.
It's the latest in a small but no less touching slew of texts from friends and coworkers wishing him a happy birthday. Claire, Jill, Rebecca, Helena, Ashley, Patrick, and even Ada (although the number is private and there’s no name attached to the short, concise text message, he knows it’s her because she does this every year) have sent messages, among a few others.
Sometimes he forgets he knows this many people, and that they all care about him enough to remember his birthday.
Though he’s mildly horrified by Claire’s GIF of choice for their annual gay porn ‘happy fucking birthday!’ e-card tradition. Funnily enough he didn’t know a man could get his arm that deep in a guy’s ass, and he would’ve liked to have kept it that way. At least the birthday wishes are written in pumpkin orange bubble font instead of rainbow glitter like last year’s.
Abruptly, Leon gets a flashback to ten years ago. He'd gotten spectacularly drunk on cheap booze the night before his 30th, and had woken up three days later to a pounding headache and scratchy, cheap carpet under his cheek.
All he remembers was crying into his phone at a horrified Claire (he doesn't remember the specifics, and she's never deigned tell him exactly what he said, so it must've been terrible), before he threw said phone into a river. He hadn't known it then, but Claire had torn the city apart looking for him, terrified that Leon was going to do something incredibly stupid.
She hadn't found him. Chris had. It'd been in some shitty little motel room in the middle of nowhere. The receptionist had gone through the wringer with Chris, having tried to keep him out until the threat of Chris's ire had grown too much to bear, and had apparently handed over a spare set of keys to Leon's room with tears in his eyes.
Chris had been furious with Leon for making his sister worry so much, for making them all worry so much, and had forced him into an icy shower to sober up. Only to spend a solid hour on the bathroom floor with a very wet and naked Leon, holding his hair back so he could vomit into the toilet, sobbing and muttering absolute nonsense between painful heaves.
He graciously did not mention the cuts on Leon's inner wrists. Not then, at least.
When asked why he'd suddenly gone off the deep end, Leon had said nothing, much to the annoyance of the Redfields. They didn't push him on it though, respecting the boundary. It had been months before they stopped checking on him three or four times a day through calls, texts, and unannounced visits when they knew he was home.
But Leon remembers that sharp pit of despair in his belly that night. He remembers so well, you'd think it all happened yesterday and not ten years ago. The voices in his head that said this was as good as it was gonna get. That it was pointless to hope for anything more because someone like him, someone fucked up in the head, wasn't destined for anything but bloodshed and misery and loneliness and--
And yet, here he is.
"What's up? You started frowning all of a sudden. Something wrong? The bigwigs aren't sending you on a mission on your fucking birthday, are they?"
"Huh? Oh, no. No mission." Leon sets his phone aside. "Just thinking."
He tries for a smile, but it feels forced. He looks away, at the fridge, where Hunnigan's present for his 39th sits: a little fridge magnet made from a photo of him and Chris, a selfie from the night they started dating. It was wintertime and snowing, and they were both red-nosed and dressed up in scarves and beanies.
Chris has a thing for photos, and he'd bullied Leon into taking it. Leon still maintains his smile looks awkward and silly. He hadn't known what to do with his left hand so he'd settled it in a half-formed fist on his own chest, but Chris loves that photo. He has it hanging up over the mantelpiece in his own apartment.
“Penny for your thoughts.”
“You’ll think it’s stupid.”
“I won’t. Promise.”
“Well, it’s just…” Leon trails off, thinking.
Chris brings over their breakfast. He presses a kiss to the top of Leon’s head as he heads over to the fridge for the pitcher of orange juice and two glasses. When he settles down, he shoots Leon a look that says he’s still interested in hearing what Leon has to say, but he’s not going to push the matter.
“If you had asked me ten years ago when I turned thirty where I’d be when I turned forty, I would have told you ‘Dead’, and I’d have meant it,” Leon finally says.
Chris looks like he wants to object, but he stays silent. He doesn’t raise the piece of bacon he’s just cut to his lips, opting to watch Leon in unmoving silence.
“If that wasn’t an option, then I'd say miserable and alone, like always. After Raccoon City and being dragged into this mess with BOWs and corrupt governments, I never thought I could be happy. I thought my life was…done. Finished. I felt like I was already dead, my body just hadn’t gotten the memo yet.”
Chris sighs, low and heavy, a commiserating glint in his eyes. “And now?”
“And now, I… Chris, I just…” There’s a lump in Leon’s throat. He grabs for the pitcher, but Chris already has it, pouring until Leon’s cup is almost full to the brim. Grateful, he takes a long drink. “Chris, I’ve never felt this…happy before. My phone was full of text messages wishing me happy birthday. You’re here, with me, and you made me breakfast. That’s never happened before.
“You know what my home life was like when I was a kid.” At this, Chris nods. They’ve spent many a night hashing out their collective childhood traumas on top of their BOW-related traumas. Those nights usually end up in tears, unable to sleep, holding each other until the sun comes up. “This shit never happened, not even then. No one ever cared enough to try. My parents often forgot my birthday with all their other shit going on. Then they were dead, and I was being passed around foster homes, and never established a connection to anyone long enough. I doubt some of them even remembered my name before I was taken again.
“And now you’re here, and you’re trying, and everyone else just seems to care even if they only sent a text. What am I supposed to do with all this?” Leon laughs, though he doesn’t find anything funny. It’s just so overwhelming. “I thought—fuck, I thought I’d be dead before I got this.”
“I’ll make sure it happens every year.” Chris grabs Leon’s hand and squeezes. “Every single year until we’re old and grey and need chairlifts to get up the stairs. Probably even after that, if I don’t have arthritic wrists and can’t hold a frying pan. As long as I’m around, I’ll never let you be anything less than happy ever again.”
Leon’s trembling. His eyes are prickling with hot tears. Yet he’s grinning from ear to ear. “I love you.”
“Love you, too.” Chris kisses Leon’s knuckles, then lets his hand go. “Now hurry up and eat, birthday boy. I have a whole day planned out for you and we’re slightly behind schedule.”
“What? There’s more?” When he realised Chris was home, it felt like a birthday gift enough. Leon’s flabbergasted. What else can he possibly need other than this? “I thought we were gonna laze around all day in bed, watch movies.”
“We can laze around in bed tonight. Trust me, you’re gonna love what I’ve got planned out.”
And fuck, Leon does.
Laying in bed that night, after being pampered for a good six hours straight by his loving boyfriend, Leon can only think one thing; if turning forty has been this amazing and luxurious, he can’t wait until he turns fifty.