One Hell of a Nightmare

[madimpossibledreamer]

tag: title is not a joke, this is your warning the feels train is approaching

Main Points:
Buffy/Devil May Cry/Resident Evil/Background NCIS Crossover (Hold My Heart)
Chapter Summary: As if Leon's memories of Raccoon City couldn't get any worse.
Word Count: 1163
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Leon/Xander

 

         It hasn’t always been like this. Leon knows that. But how can it be wrong, when he cherishes the memories, Xander in that suit that brings out his eyes at prom, nervously dancing, how proud he’d been when Leon had graduated the academy, and when he’d gotten his first job offer.
         Waking up late, because Leon had been nervous for absolutely no reason. He’d met the others briefly and Marvin had assured him that none of them were going to be an ass about his partner and why doesn’t he just bring Xander with him on his first day, just so they can all meet him. Xander had spent a little too long ‘calming his nerves’ the night before, and then that phone call not to come in?
         “You didn’t get fired, officer. It’ll be fine,” his sweetheart reassures him, throwing a water bottle and an energy bar his way.
         He’s too nervous. He’d probably throw up a proper breakfast, and he doesn’t have the time for one anyway. “Thanks, babe. I just...I don’t want to mess this up, you know? This is an important job, and I want to do it right.”
         “An important job for an important man,” Xander teases, leaning in for a kiss. “I’ll go get the car ready.”
         “I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” Leon protests, blushing but happy, and Xander winks. It looks a little odd, but Leon can’t pinpoint why, so he shoves the feeling aside and ignores it.
         “Oh, I can think of a few things,” he laughs, and then is out the door.
         The feeling of something being wrong just grows when Leon notices his gas is low, like he needs to be delayed any further. They have to get there, they have to get there on time, but at the same time he’s absolutely dreading what’s coming because it feels entirely inevitable and yet he doesn’t consciously know what it is.
         “It’ll be fine.” He really doesn’t know what he’d do without Xander, really. He’s glad he’s got someone here for emotional support.
         And then he notices the abandoned police car, and the blood, and his stomach drops. “Stay here,” he tells Xander, who immediately shakes his head, grabbing his favorite battle-axe from the back of the car (why does that seem weird?) with a determination in his blue eyes that Leon’s seen, several times.
         “Like hell am I letting you go in there without backup. We’ve dealt with worse, remember?” They have, even if Leon can’t quite put a finger on it, but that doesn’t mean Leon isn’t scared anyway.
         It’s zombies. Normally they don’t deal with zombies. Xander does manage to take one’s head off and he looks absolutely magnificent, but that distraction is enough to cause Leon to get bitten and it’s all-encompassing agony and from the pained look on his face Xander’s going to feel guilty about that one for...way too long.
         They save a young woman. The oncoming car, the explosion, getting separated, only this time (this time?) it’s Claire and him, and Xander’s on the other side, but he’s good at climbing and surviving and he’ll be fine. Claire has to pull him away from the burning car anyway, because he doesn’t want to leave.
         A zombie breaks in, and Claire shoots the arm off before Leon even registers, and—
         God, no, Xander, is all his brain can manage even as he screams his sweetheart’s name. Xander doesn’t even twitch in recognition, bloody drool hanging from a half-unhinged jaw, like Xander’s a snake ready to swallow him whole. The left eye’s dangling, and it’s definitely not intact, but then, neither is that part of his face, with bits of bone and hair adjacent, like a zombie had attempted to take a bite out of the brain, only to be thwarted by the skull. The white hair is matted with blood and other things Leon doesn’t want to identify, skin and flesh in tatters and what are probably bits of organs poking out where they shouldn’t be.
         “Leon! That’s not Xander anymore!” Claire screams, trying to snap him out of it, reloading her gun, but Leon couldn’t move even if he wanted to, and yeah, sure, maybe he should, he’s a police officer, it’s his duty to protect others even if he can’t protect himself, but a large part of him asks, what’s the point.
         So he stands there as the thing that was Xander lumbers forward and leans in for a twisted parody of a hickey, the last embrace they’ll ever share, and the pain is so intense Leon screams as he—
         half flings himself out of bed. The jarring impact of him hitting the floor and smacking his foot on the dresser, ow, knocks him out of it, but it still feels real.
         Instantly, he’s scrambling for the dresser, because he can’t sit here another second not knowing. He finds the picture he’d taken of Xander’s Devil Trigger on his phone, his half-devil looking all bashful, if a little pleased, and finds his breathing slow with the confirmation that there’s absolutely no way his blue-eyed beauty could be zombified in the first place.
         What the hell, brain, not cool, he’s self-conscious about the eye when he remembers, is his next thought. Because while no, he absolutely can’t control that, the unconscious mind does what it wants, he still feels the need to apologize to his partner even when he’s not even here.
         It’s not the first nightmare he’s had about someone he loves getting zombified. It’s not even the first one he’s had about someone he knows is actually 100% immune, because he’s had them about Claire and Chris, before. It’s been a while, sure, and he’d definitely gone over those with his therapist, but it’s the first one he’s had about Xander—maybe because it’s finally starting to sink in that the guy goes on assignment, just like him. Sure, he’d been worried in the abstract, which was the whole reason he’d started to just hang out in Xander’s apartment when he was on assignment in the first place, but it’d been easy to think back to the whole Stabbing Incident and go ‘eh, he’ll be fine’.
         It’s not until, on autopilot, he’s scarfed the bagel and on his way out the door that he realizes something and finds himself blushing. Because normally, when he has a nightmare, he reaches to his knife. Used to be his gun, before his sweetheart being antsy about guns had made him lock that up and keep a knife in its place. Today, that apparently hadn’t even occurred to him. He’d gone straight for that picture instead.
         He’s going to kiss Xander a whole bunch when he comes back from assignment, Leon decides, and not just out of guilt. Because the guy absolutely deserves to be kissed a lot, and someone’s got to do it, and Leon just might be the right guy for the job.