#anyway have this old oc-centric resident evil fic

[chorusfic]

through the doorway

When the door closes on them, it is not a gentle thing.

There were no raised voices, though, no angry, cutting words, just the sound of a door shutting hard, with finality, without being slammed. It was the sense that they had both lost something, without knowing precisely what.

Monica had let the wounds in her heart fester, and Leon’s attempts to bandage them had been for naught.

The door to them closed as sharply as the door to Leon’s home, but neither of them turned the lock.

---

The first time the door to them considers opening again, it’s at an FBI safehouse just south of the West Virginia border.

It’s not the first time Leon’s been called to a bustling safehouse reeking of steel-boned discipline and desperation for answers. Two years after Raccoon City, and mistakes are still made–mistakes that lead to situations like these. Avoidable ones, but no less tragic.

Across the room, a familiar shape with a messy dark brown braid stands with a clipboard in one arm and a pen behind her ear. There’s no coffee mug to be found in her general vicinity, so Leon goes to fetch one. An olive branch.

She speaks before looking up. “I’ll have my report on the hour, as requested, when the scientists get back to–”

“Monica.” he says, and watches her posture–so easy and almost casual–stiffen like a statue.

Monica turns her head slowly and her gaze dips toward the coffee mug before returning to him. The dark rings under her equally dark eyes are more stark than ever, twin monuments to many late nights and exhausting days. She reaches out and takes the mug, but sets it on a nearby desk while her grip on her clipboard tightens. “Officer Kennedy, you’re here, good.” she clears her throat, and Leon’s own tightens at the brisk cadence of her voice, “I’d assumed you were my new superior, coming to harass me about the reports. You’ll be briefed once they arrive.”

The silence that sits between them is an opportunity. The rest of the safehouse is absorbed in their tasks, and both of them stand far enough away that they couldn’t be directly eavesdropped upon.

“Nicky,” is all Leon gets the chance to say, before he watches Monica’s grip on her clipboard tighten even more, white-knuckled through her fingerless gloves.

“Now’s not the time.” she says quietly, a whisper under the door to them, and as quickly as it came, the opportunity is gone.

Still, he grasps for it anyway. “Will there be a time?”

Her quiet is the only answer given, but it is answer enough.

---

The second time the door to them considers opening, it’s after a few too many drinks and a little too much tension to let go of.

Touch is easier and yet so much more difficult than words. Easier, because deep in her chest Monica knows she can trust him not to hurt her, and harder, because of that knowledge that she trusts him at all. It should have been easier to cut him loose, like so many others, but here they are, with their painfully familiar touches on feverishly warm skin.

She’s surprised he can’t taste the poison, leaking from somewhere in her soul, but if he does, he doesn’t seem to mind it.

It’s familiarity without depth, that same trap they’ve fallen into before, but an addicting and inevitable one–somehow, they end up in the other’s orbit without acknowledgment beyond this, and sometimes Monica knows he might try to scratch the surface, to dig deep, but not tonight.

Tonight he’s willing to take a page from her book while she scratches his surface, deep lines on skin that are something like begging and something like desperation–for forgiveness? For understanding?–but in the end neither of them can think straight enough to consider the implications.

Morning comes and sees Monica leave before she’s noticed, a fresh scar, self-inflicted, on her heart, as the door quietly shuts behind her.

---

There is a shift, when Monica looks at the door to them, considers where it lurks in her subconscious while she rests in a hospital bed with an IV in her arm and a new bandage around her shoulder and chest.

She considers how they left that door where it was, thinking back then that it might be better left closed for good, locking away the idea of putting forth the effort that it would take for her to leech the soft, subtle poison from her heart. She considers the many words they exchanged, frustrated and hurt. Neither of them understood what they needed, and had instead taken what they wanted.

It had led them to this–a closed door, with no one waiting on the other side, the wordless attempts they’d made to crack it open, only to shut it more firmly than before.

It’s easy to convince herself that she reaps what she sows–she is the solitary master of her fate–but the scythe is worn and rusted now, and she knows she cannot rise up from this hospital bed, return to her miserable solitude, tend the fields and boughs of her life, and convince herself it is enough.

Instead, Monica looks inward, to that deep, howling void in her chest, with its insidious and calculated poison, and she lights a candle.

---

The third time the door to them considers opening, it happens like this.

A voicemail, left on Leon’s cell early in the morning–early enough that the caller would know he wouldn’t yet be awake–asked him for a moment of his time, and ordinarily time was a luxury Leon never had in abundance, but for this, time could be made.

He finds himself at Baker’s Beach, close enough to see the Golden Gate bridge in the distance, far enough away from the summer vacationers testing the sun and its capacity to burn. Even in the heat, Monica stands in her jacket at least one size too big, baggy on her frame. Her hair is shorter now, but still long enough to braid, and the way her hands are held in front of her body, out of Leon’s sight, says she’s holding something in her hands.

He approaches and discovers that it’s a camera. Monica holds it up and snaps a shot of the bridge before setting it down on a nearby rock. She turns when Leon’s boot scuffs against a small stone, and there is resounding silence where their eyes meet.

It feels like a risk, but it’s an easy one to take. “Hey, Nicky.”

The skin around Monica’s eyes tightens, but her expression softens. “Hey, Leon.”

Looking at the camera, he nods towards it, a safe topic to begin with. “I didn’t know you were such a tourist.”

She huffs, and some of the tension between them breaks. “I’m not, but out of all the places I lived in while I was young, San Francisco was never one of them. Figure I’d better take a picture just in case I never come back.”

Silence falls, and Leon’s moments from asking what Monica wants when she sighs and jams her hands in her pockets, looking up to meet his eyes. “We made a bit of a mess, didn’t we?”

It’s phrased as a question, but both of them already know the answer. Leon grasps for whatever angle Monica hopes to take with bridging the gap that’s slowly widened between them–but not for long, never for long–and comes up empty.

“Yeah, I guess we did.” Leon rubs a hand on the back of his neck, thinking, thinking, trying to gather the thoughts he’d prepared on so many restless nights when he’d wondered what he might say if this opportunity ever came again. For the first time in years, he considers the door to them, and dares to reach for the unlocked handle.

“I know it’s been…a while.” Monica shuffles her feet, but doesn’t break his gaze. “And I understand if these are wounds you’d rather not reopen, or if you wanna just move on–you’d be more than within your rights to–but at least I thought we could get…closure.”

Leon’s stomach drops, and he thinks he does well to hide it. “You’ve never wanted to talk about this before.”

“I was afraid of what it meant.” Monica admits, and something in Leon’s chest tightens. She does look away this time, so briefly, to the beach and the sunbathers behind them. When she turns back, it’s like a barrier has just been knocked down, a barrier Leon knows had to have been there years ago, but he never knew what it meant for her to keep it there. “I was afraid of being better because I didn’t know any different. Doing everything alone was just…how I learned to handle things.”

“And then I didn’t know how to help you.” Leon trails off as some of the pieces fall together at once.

“We frustrated each other because we didn’t know any better.” Monica shrugs, and it tries to be a casual thing, but the weight of their words offsets it. “And we thought the bond we had in Raccoon City would be enough to carry it through, instead of talking about it. But it didn’t. Turns out leaning on our shared trauma wasn’t enough to substitute a real relationship.”

A laugh bubbles up in Leon’s chest despite himself, but he turns it into a cough before it can be given voice. “So…where does that leave us?”

Monica takes a deep breath, shivering despite the heat. “That’s up to you,” is all she says, handing him control over what happens to that door, that door leading to them that’s been still and silent for years now, with its occasional half-hearted notes passed under it, its hurried whispers of another time, maybe. “Both of us had some fault in what happened, but I needed to make the choice to get better. I wasn’t ready to make that choice back then, but…I’ve taken steps to do it now.” Her shrug is less casual that time, stiff and nervous. “I’m not where I want to be, yet. But I know how to get there, and I’m on my way.”

“I want to help you,” he finds himself saying without thinking, because it’s the first thing that comes to mind, because of course he wants to help, but now a barrier between them that prevented it has been knocked down and he knows better how.

“Yeah?” it’s so raw and open and unusually soft for Monica, but the question is there, and he can see something like hope in her dark eyes, in the slight lifting of her lip that’s trying to be a smile.

“Uh…yeah.” Leon says, because he can feel the heat in his neck threatening to overtake his face, and he can’t blame it on the sun because they haven’t been out here for that long, but Monica’s grin gets wider, and it feels like years have sloughed off them both. “But I want to do it right. I want to know more about you. If you…want to tell me.”

“I do.” she takes a step forward, almost within touching distance, and the line of tension between her brows that Leon can’t ever remember seeing her without vanishes. “I really, really do.”

---

When the door opens on them, it is no gentler than the closing, but for all the right reasons.

It’s the excitement of summer afternoons, slamming the door open to let the warmth rush in, the easy swing on hinges as the breeze passes through, with the same certainty of Leon in her arms, of the sand beneath their boots, of the raucous laughter of some of the beach’s guests behind them, all but forgotten because they aren’t important here but their presence is, their brightness and noise and vitality.

Monica throws the door open, and lets the light pour in.

#my writing #*monica drake #me: *makes a fic blog to post my wow fic* #me: *posts a vague oneshot for a fandom and oc i never talk about* #consistent posting? don't know her #it's blue's fault because they brought it up and i wrote it forever ago but never posted it lmao #anyway have this old oc-centric resident evil fic