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Leon grabs the headboard to brace himself as he begins to thrust faster. Claire lets out a breathy whimper beneath him, one hand gripping his hip, the other tucked between her legs, rubbing herself in an erratic rhythm. Her cheeks are flushed, her lips parted between panted breaths; he can’t help but lean down to kiss her. Every part of her is perfect in his mind, even her flaws, even the times they get frustrated with each other. She’s been his anchor, his rock, keeping him grounded when he starts losing himself to past trauma.
She’s incredible.
But he hates the dark bruise on the top slope of her breast, raised vein-like protrusions snaking beyond the blackening skin towards her heart. He thrusts faster, as if fucking her harder will push the bruise away, will remove the infection crawling through both of their bodies.
Claire comes first, clenching around him and releasing a low moan against his lips. It only takes a handful more thrusts for him to finish, spilling inside her while his body trembles and he lowers his head to the pillow beside her neck. He makes sure that it’s his left side she sees, not the part of his neck with the slowly spreading mark. Like this, they can pretend that it’s just them, no virus, no pain.
He thinks of the report. Stage three is fatal. Stage three means dying. He doesn’t want to lose Claire.
She strokes his back, fingers grazing over the dip of his spine. What would he do without this sort of touch? What would he do if he couldn’t come home to her? If their bed was cold and all signs of Claire Alyson Kennedy were cold and lifeless? No warmth in her jacket or heat in the engine of her bike. No smell of cinnamon and coffee in the mornings while she gets ready for work. Her eyeliner no longer framing her stunning blue eyes.
Carefully, he lowers himself on top of her, bracing himself on his elbows so he doesn’t put his full weight on her. He’s soft now, but doesn’t pull out.
She strokes her hand through his hair, and he leans into the touch.
“Pizza or Chinese?” she asks against his ear, quietly familiar, a sort of routine that doesn’t feel mundane. Her favorite pizza place is still open after more than thirty-five years, family owned, a little place with a dedicated following. The idea of sitting in bed naked, eating pizza, and watching mindless television is always enticing, but he doesn’t answer right away.
He refuses to let that pizza place lose one of its best customers. Sherry is investigating everything she can to try to find a cure. God damn it, he can’t lose either of them.
A low grunt escapes him as he pushes himself upright and slips out of her. He grabs the fresh rag from the bedside table and cleans both of them up before tossing it towards the laundry hamper. He doesn’t know if it makes it in, but he doesn’t care. Claire welcomes him beside her, rolling onto her side when his arm curls around her waist, tugging her close. Her skin is slick with a sheen of drying sweat. She’s warm. Alive.
“Pizza,” he says. He feels Claire shift so she can plant a kiss against his neck.
A brief moment passes where she reaches over to grab her phone, then tucks herself against him again while dialing the pizza place - it’s in her ‘favorites’ contacts, has been for as long as he’s known her - and ordering. A dark bruise has started forming on the inside of her wrist. He noticed it when she was working on her bike, thinking it was a smudge of grease, but it didn’t go away when she showered.
“Twenty minutes.”
He nods his assent, but doesn’t say anything. Twenty minutes feels like no time at all, not when there’s a clock ticking down to the end of him and Claire and Sherry faster than the normal mortal tick tick tick. He wants another thirty or forty years with Claire. As it stands, the slow-acting T-Virus strain has sped up and the countdown is getting faster.
Twenty minutes. Twenty goddamn minutes.
“Leon?” Her voice is low and tinted with concern. He looks at her. “Sherry’s working on it.”
Claire’s always been intuitive to his thoughts, but this has been fairly obvious as of late. Since learning about this mutated strain infecting him and his loved ones, it hasn’t left his mind. Sex helps, alcohol helps but he’s moved away from using that as a coping mechanism. When there’s no distractions, though, it’s just him and his thoughts. Problem solving, worrying, stressing. It used to be easier to ignore, but now he and Claire can’t even look at each other without seeing black marks on their bodies.
“I know,” he says and reaches up to tuck some dampened strands of hair behind her ear. He should be trying to spend more time in the present, focusing on the time they have left instead of the time they’re losing, but he can’t. He’s plagued by the thought of losing everyone he loves before dying himself. He’s not ready for this. He’s not ready. He isn’t fucking ready.
His touch slips down her neck, her collarbone, to that darkening mark on her breast, textured by disease, as if her skin is necrotizing. Sherry’s pretty sure it isn’t, the cells aren’t dead, just…infected. The look of it is horrific, though. He’s tried to scrub it off, to pick at it, pull the skin away like it’s just a covering, a bandage, a layer that’s marring the skin. It bleeds but it never heals.
Sherry told him to stop doing it, that it could possibly make it worse, make the infection spread faster. She isn’t sure, but there’s the possibility. So he’s tried to stop picking at it. Tried to stop wanting to scrape steel wool over his neck. He’s trying, he’s trying.
“Leon,” she says again while pushing herself up onto her elbow. Her voice is firmer now, but not without gentleness. Pulling him back to the present instead of wallowing in the grief of something that hasn’t even happened. May not happen. God, he hopes there’s a cure.
Her hand rests on his chest.
“We’re still alive. As soon as we have any information, you know we’ll both be out there, digging in our heels. We won’t die without fighting to live.”
He looks at her. Not the mark on her chest, but her eyes, the light wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, speaking to the smiles and laughter she’s had over the course of her life. He looks at that worried pull of her brow as she all but pleads for him to wrestle away from his thoughts, even for a short while.
Reaching up, he touches her cheek. He wants to assure her that he’s here, he won’t think about the negativity for now, let’s watch some shitty reruns or infomercials and eat pizza and-
But he can’t. Some moments are harder to shake than others, and this is one of them. Slipping his hand around the back of her neck, he pulls her close and rolls her onto her back again, curling himself over her, face buried against her shoulder, legs on either side of hers, arms wrapped tightly around her. She’s alive and he wants her to stay that way, goddammit, and he hates that thoughts of losing her impede on the thoughts that she’s still here, right now, with him.
For the first time since finding out about the infection, he cries. The sting of tears has threatened him before, but he’s never let them fall. Not even when alone.
But now, he can’t stop them. He can’t stop thinking about the life in Claire fading, dimming, until there’s nothing left but a body that used to house her laughter and passion. His own life be damned, but he can’t fucking stand the thought of her dying of this when she deserves only to live a long life. She shifts in his arms, holding him back and resting her cheek against his hair. Moments later, he feels the tremble in her breath beneath the sound of his own. She’s also crying.
He knows she’s terrified, and he wants to apologize for being caught in his own head all the time, for her needing to be strong when all she probably wants to do sometimes is break down. She’s so much stronger than he is in so many ways that he isn’t, but she shouldn’t have to be. Not this much.
He’ll apologize to her later.
“I don’t want you to die,” he says, voice shaking and thick with tears.
She’s silent for a few moments, but he hears her taking sharp, shallow breaths, trying to steel herself before speaking. But when she does, her words are choked around sobs that wrack her body. “I’m scared, Leon. I don’t…I can’t lose you, and I don’t want to die. I’m so scared.”
His hold on her tightens as she presses her face against his shoulder, no longer holding herself back. She cries like he hasn’t heard her cry in years, and he understands, he knows, and he gently rocks side to side while they both cry until they can’t anymore. It's cathartic to finally let go, release, let everything he's feeling out to the woman he loves so fiercely. Claire’s head lowers back to the pillow and their grips on each other loosen. For long moments, they simply exist, wrapped around each other, letting their breathing even out.
Finally, he raises his head to look at her; red eyes and flushed cheeks and trembling lips, dried tears leaving tracks back into her hair. God, he loves her so fucking much, and he tells her so before brushing his lips against hers in the softest of kisses.
“Do you think there’s a cure?” she asks quietly. Neither of them know the answer, but that isn’t the point right now. The hope is what they need.
“Doesn’t matter, we’re too stubborn to die.” That gets a small laugh out of both of them. He gives her one more kiss then lifts himself off of her, sitting back and wiping his face. “If there is a cure, we’ll find it.” He holds out his hands for her, helping her sit upright when she takes them. Their pizza has probably been delivered and they missed it, but he's in no hurry just yet. Claire is his priority.
“I promise.”