Leon S. Kennedy is Dead
by KC

Disclaimer: I don't own any of this.
Warning: Possible biblical levels of blood, hellfire and destruction.
Pairing: Dante/Leon
Other Info: Relax, it's not a deathfic. I don't do those.
Rating: R

Part 1

Dante lounged in his chair, boots up on his desk, drowsily watching his ceiling fan turn. Quiet nights were the best. The distant rumble of a car engine several blocks away, the breeze blowing gently past the window, even the flickering hum of his neon sign outside--the lonely street was peaceful when people weren't smashing his door in.

In a few minutes, he'd get up and kick the jukebox to listen to his favorite song for awhile. Fall asleep on the couch, maybe. No job meant no money, but a night off was worth it. Last night had been little spider devils flooding out of a kid's closet, the night before then was a fifty foot demonic eel in the sewers that had taken hours to find, and the whole week before that had been a horde of possessed dolls that had followed him home and kept popping up in the weirdest places. The lacy porcelain doll with the red eyes didn't think he'd spotted her yet on the ceiling fan, but she couldn't find a way down without smashing herself so he didn't bother shooting her yet.

A late night with no phone call was a nice change. If only the damn pizza guy would hurry up and get there, it'd be perfect.

The distant car engine was drowned under screeching brakes and a metallic crunch. Dante frowned. Why would anyone crash on these streets? There wasn't even a liquor store nearby.

Several rapid pops followed. Gunshots.

Grimacing, Dante shut his eyes. No. They could have been firecrackers or a fuse blowing. Anything else. It was a pizza and beer night, dammit.

A moment passed, and then someone audibly stumbled into a trashcan. There were several more pops, and then the faint sound of footsteps running through the street.

No doubt about it. The footsteps were getting closer.

Grumbling to himself, Dante pushed out of his chair and stomped towards the door. He put his hand on his holster, snarling that it better just be the pizza guy getting mugged, and yanked the door open.

The pizza guy stood in front of him, holding the box in his gray hands. Two of his fingers were gone, ending in bloody stumps, and the side of his neck looked to be chewed down to the spine. The jaw hung slack, drooling blood onto the box. From the look of the sodden cardboard, he'd been standing there for awhile.

"Of course," Dante sighed.

His voice made the dead delivery man snap to attention, dropping the box as he lunged. Dante fired. The top of the corpse's head blew off, followed by his jaw, before the box hit the sidewalk. As the pizza zombie fell to its knees and collapsed sideways, Dante stepped over the body and looked around.

The street was as silent as always, which made the dozens of shambling corpses a little disconcerting. A handful of young men, their gang tattoos mangled by bite marks, a homeless woman missing her arm, a young girl dragging one leg locked in rigor mortis--they all turned toward him as if sensing he was alive, but none of them made more than muffled moans.

"Funny," Dante said to himself. "I was thinking of catching a zombie flick."

As slow as they were, there were so many to shoot that the crowd kept creeping closer. Dante began stepping back along the wall, staying out of their reach and stomping the occasional crawler that still had part of its head. The mutilated bodies reminded him of the grainy tv shots last year, people with broken necks and huge gaping wounds lurching at the camera. Something about a city out east that Trish had tried to get him to watch on the news.

He paused from shooting, glancing down the street as more zombies came towards him. In the silence, he heard a body dragging itself along the pavement and their staggering footsteps. And someone running towards him.

"This one of those new movie highspeed zombies?" he wondered, turning around and raising his handguns.

In his sights, he saw someone familiar halt and sidestep his aim. Dante followed just as fast, but he didn't fire, watching the blonde man lean against the brick wall beside them, catching his breath. The hair obscured his face, but Dante didn't need to see him to know who he was. He remembered that irritated look anywhere.

"Hey, cuz'," he said with a smile. "First day on the job?"

Leon glared up at him, but he didn't argue. He dropped the clip from his Silver Ghost and put another magazine in, then stood straight and let Dante take out the nearest zombies.

"Didn't know you were in this town," Leon said. "How long've these things been out here?"

"I dunno," Dante shrugged, shooting another handful. "The pizza guy didn't knock."

Leon gave him a look, conserving his ammunition as he looked around. "It's only been a couple hours. It shouldn't have spread this fast."

"Hours since what?" Dante asked, and his irritation began to show. "And by the way, if your bosses nuke my town, you better have a guest room 'cause I'm not crashing on Trish's couch."

"I don't have a boss anymore," Leon said, ignoring his comment. "And you're not rooming with me. You always had weird things in your bedroom, little goblins running through your closet stealing my toys."

Dante didn't mention the handful of possessed dolls hiding in the shop. "No boss, huh? So what're you doing here besides bringing your mess into a new town?"

"Didn't you hear the--"

Leon stopped. The sound was faint, but he knew the whisper of something big crawling on the cement. The creature chasing him had finally caught up. There was no way to tell where it was coming from, but as it grew louder, he moved away from the wall and stood back to back with Dante, raising his gun.

The red coat and the smell of leather swirled gently around him, and for a moment, Leon had a flashback of his cousin visiting him during summer. He hadn't known him well at all, wondering why his strange aunt had brought only Dante and not his twin Vergil. Dante had been a couple years older, a lanky teenager in the oversized red coat, and he'd seemed so much smarter and cooler as he sulked on the back porch.

Leon would never call him smart or cool now, but he did feel a twinge of envy that Dante never had to reload.

"Who's big and ugly?" Dante asked, looking up as he spotted the creature two blocks away, peering around the corner. "Someone you know?"

"Kind of," Leon said. "Used to be Governor Pesoli. My boss."

What used to be the governor rose up on her hind tentacles, two stories tall, slithering toward them like a squid with dozens of arms. Her three huge eyes rolled crazily in all directions, and hundreds of needle-like teeth filled her mouth. As she moved, she snatched up zombies and devoured them, shredding them to ribbons.

Leon fired a few rounds, but they made no impact. She didn't seem to notice one of her tentacles shot in half.

"Come on," Dante said, nodding toward the roof. "This'll be more fun from up there."

Following his look, Leon noticed the lack of any way up short of a superhuman leap.

"Dante," he said. "I can't fly."

"Sure you can," Dante smiled. "You're with me."

Before Leon could argue, Dante put one arm around his waist and yanked him securely against his side, then jumped up along the wall just as one of the tentacles smashed into the bricks below them. The impact jarred Leon's teeth and pieces of broken stone flew by, and the street flipped wrongside up as Dante did a somersault to the next building. The force of the jump nearly made Leon black out.

Leon winced and tightened his grip on his gun. His stomach felt like it was twisting around and he hoped he didn't throw up on his cousin.

Landing on the concrete roof was a relief. He stumbled a step, then shook his head clear and aimed at the eyes staring right at him. They were as large as a theater screen, looming over him as the former governor rose up on all her tentacles, but Leon burst the middle eye with one shot. He froze in surprise as white viscous fluid exploded in all directions, but quickly recovered himself and took aim at the other eyes.

As she reared back, there was a red blur and a glint of steel, and then Leon caught a glimpse of Dante driving his sword to the hilt in the monster's head. Blood and black ichor sprayed from the wound, splashing the street as the monster's head started to swell and wobble like rubber.

"Dante!" Leon yelled, recognizing the symptoms. "It's gonna explode! Get out of--"

The head shot apart with enough force to knock him on his back. He saw stars for a moment before he realized that he'd hit his head on the concrete, and he blinked until the flashing lights went away.

Wet glops of meat and chunks of still twitching muscle landed everywhere--hanging from the power lines, stuck to the walls and slowly sliding to the ground. He could hear the tentacles slapping the pavement in death throes and the bile still flowing out of the body.

"Thanks for the warning."

Leon glanced to his right. His cousin's boots glistened with blood as he stood over him with the confident grin Leon had learned to hate. Blood dripped off the red coat as Dante bent, hand extended.

"You all right?"

Drawing a long breath, Leon took his hand and let Dante help him to his feet. The motion made him light headed, but Dante kept a grip on his hand and put his other on Leon's shoulder, holding him steady.

For a moment, Leon was back in the past--years after their first meeting, when one of Dante's jobs spilled into Washington D.C., and both of them had to mop up the creeping dead. Dante was a cocky kid with sadder eyes, Leon had learned to jump at his shadow, and both of them had learned that even when you win the fight, you can lose something vital.

Leon never asked what happened to the twin he never met. It wasn't his to ask, even when they'd dropped most of their guard and lay vulnerable in bed beside each other. And Dante never offered to tell.

"I'm good," Leon said, standing straight. "To be honest, I kind of expected something like this."

Dante laughs once. "You mean it really was your first day?"

Shaking off the bits of gore stuck to himself, Leon nods ruefully. "Political rally for the governor. Didn't think it'd turn into Night of the Living Calamari. Don't suppose you have any ammo on you?"

"Never needed it," Dante said unapologetically. "But there's some back at my place. And then you can fill me in on all'a this."

"You sure you wanna get involved?" Leon said, holstering his gun. "Be a shame if something happened to that nice coat of yours."

The old taunt made Dante smile. There'd been a time when he hated the thought of even scratching his coat, and he'd barked at the much younger Leon if he got too close. And then had come the day when Dante ripped off its sleeve without thinking about it because there were more important things in the world.

"Not as worried about it as I used to be," he said. "Besides, I gotta take care of the family I got left, right?"

Leon didn't answer as he let Dante hold him again. His cousin's nauseating acrobatics almost took his mind off of what should've been a flippant comment, but Dante wasn't the only one without any other kin left. It wasn't something Leon liked to think about.

Humans weren't meant to jump around like a devil could, and Leon groaned and tightened his grip on Dante's coat. Upside down, spinning cartwheels several stories above the road--Dante turned and used a streetlight as a springboard, and Leon clung as if he was on a roller coaster that had no safety bar.

They landed too fast on the sidewalk. The sudden stop made would have thrown Leon to the ground if Dante didn't still have his arm around him. Instead, Leon's headache burst into excruciating pain. Lights flashed around him, the air turned into lead and his head felt like it would collapse in on itself.

"Whoa, looks like you did slam your head into the concrete," Dante said, steadying him against himself. "Just stay on your feet for a couple minutes, okay? I gotta clear a path to the door."

Leon couldn't nod, but he held himself straight by holding onto Dante's coat, muffling the roaring growls and footsteps by burying his face against his chest. His cousin helped by occasionally covering his exposed ear so that the gunshots didn't make him scream.

"They busted the hinges," Dante muttered, kicking his front door closed and throwing the bolt. The small piece of metal barely kept the door from falling off. "Probably a couple inside. I'll clean 'em out in a minute."

"...head shots?" Leon mumbled. "They get back up if you don't..."

"I've seen the movies," Dante said. "Everyone knows how to kill a zombie."

A few more dizzy steps, and then Leon felt a couch against his shins. He collapsed on the worn surface, not noticing the exposed bits of stuffing or the stains hardened into the upholstery. Dante moved out of sight, presumably making sure there were no more shambling dead, leaving Leon to watch the fan slowly turning above him.

The fan with a porcelain doll doing her best to glare menacingly at him, but her tiny hands holding onto the fan blade for dear life ruined the effect.

He blinked, then shut his eyes and turned on his side.

"Dante," he moaned, sure that his cousin could hear him through the cushions. "Your possessed doll is staring at me."

"She can't get you," Dante said, and there was the sound of a sword slicing rotted flesh. "She's too afraid of breaking."

"Oh God..." Leon grumbled. He pulled the cushion over his head to block out the light. "I forgot what your place is always like. In Dante's room, dolls play with you."

"'Least it isn't a marionette," Dante called from somewhere upstairs.

Leon didn't reply. He didn't want to know.

Once the last zombie was decapitated and another possessed doll dismembered, Dante went downstairs and paused on the last step, watching Leon rest. Just looking at him, Leon seemed like he'd been modeled after Dante. He had the same build, the same height, and for a human, he was a deadly fighter.

For a human.

For a devil, he would be amusing prey for a minute or two. Leon wouldn't survive if he was run through with a knife, let alone a sword. Dante shrugged off bullets that would have killed or mangled his cousin. He'd seen the bloody mess of shredded humans left behind after hellbeasts cut through a city. And yet Leon regularly went into that meat grinder, killing mutated monsters and armies of the undead, and he did it knowing that one day he wouldn't duck or shoot fast enough.

Sometimes Dante wondered how Leon was so flippant about danger when he came close to death every day.

He sat down on the edge of the couch, lightly touching Leon's hair. Dried blood and sweat matted parts of it down, and Dante swept it back from Leon's eyes.

"How do you see anything through that?" Dante murmured.

"You've got no room to talk," Leon said, attempting a smile and failing. "I take it devils don't keep aspirin around?"

"Sure do," Dante said. He took the from his coat pocket and popped off the top, shaking out two pills. "Devil blood's no proof against hangovers. Sit up, will ya?"

Groaning in protest, Leon closed his eyes and shifted, rising up on his elbows. He felt Dante's fingertips lightly touch his lips, and he opened his mouth to accept two little pills. A half-empty bottle of cheap beer was offered next.

"Sorry," Dante said, "ain't got any water for it."

"It's fine," Leon said, taking a hesitant swig. "S'long as it's not too strong."

"Just Tiger brew," Dante assured him. "You'd need more than a mouthful to get drunk off it."

Dante took back the bottle and set it on the floor. As Leon lay back on the couch, he started to put his left arm over his eyes only to flinch and wince as he gently set it back down. Instead he put his right arm over his eyes and relaxed.

"That the one you got shot in?" Dante asked. "Still hurts?'

"Just sometimes," Leon said. "After fighting big tentacle monsters and zombies and losing my job. At least I think I lost it. Does it count if your boss dies?"

Half-smiling, Dante brought his hand to his mouth and pierced his finger. A large drop of blood welled up on his skin, and leaned over Leon and put the blood to his lips.

Instantly Leon bit down to hold it in place, drawing hard for what little blood trickled out. Dante waited, enjoying the way Leon licked. After a few drops, Dante tugged his hand free, chuckling when Leon grumbled.

"Too much is bad for you," Dante reminded him.

"I never minded before," Leon said, and he stretched, turning his left arm. "Oh, that's better. Much better. In fact, I think I might go see if I can get my paycheck from the office."

"Whoa," Dante said, putting his hands on Leon's shoulders and pushing him back down. "The blood just makes it feel better. You're still hurt. I know you humans are pretty durable, but you can't see how pale you look."

"Just tired," Leon argued, but he lay down despite himself. "I've fought on worse injuries. When there's three monsters, I'll just shoot at the blurry one in the middle, that's all."

"Lie still," Dante ordered. "Get some sleep. You can fill me in on everything later when you're not acting punchdrunk."

Leon snorted.

"Like you've ever been punchdrunk," he mumbled, drowsing as his voice dwindled. "You just stand there and eat bullets..."

"Never more than twice," Dante said.

"Tch." Leon peeked from under his forearm. "Hey, Dante? You won't go anywhere, right?"

Dante smiled. "No way. You're the one who knows what's going on, so you have to tell me when you wake up."

"You could watch the news, you know," Leon whispered.

"Now why would I waste a good evening on that?" Dante said.

He idly stroked Leon's hair, waiting until his breath turned deep and even. Dante wondered how he could sleep with the blood drying on his skin. Didn't that itch? Or had his cousin turned into one of those soldiers that slept anywhere under any circumstance?

He sat and listened to the quiet shuffling of zombies outside and the troubled, muted chittering of a very frustrated doll on his ceiling fan. He'd let her live for awhile longer. He didn't want to shoot and wake up Leon. Instead he grabbed the beer and sat in his chair, boots up on his desk. His guns and sword were in easy reach as he watched the door, yawning as he stood guard.

TBC...