A/N: This is very inspired by Des's amazing infected AU art, particularly this piece: lord-owlsnake [tumblr] post/162536661156/still-here-dont-tag-as-ship-stuff-ok

I say this every time but it's been too long since I've written for the infected AU and I still love it so much! Enjoy the angst.

Ty to hobbit_hedgehog on Ao3 for the beta :3c

"Thanks, Chris," said Claire, tapping her left hand ardently on her leg as she held her phone to her cheek with the other hand. "Yeah, yeah, I'll take care. You act like I'm in another country, not another section of the compound. I'll find my way over there tomorrow or the next day." She listened for a moment before rolling her eyes. "Yes, I do mean it this time."

It was only another minute or two before she hung up that phone. It was easier talking to her brother these days, now that he wasn't on active duty and she was actually in the same country as him for an extended period of time.

Still, after all they had been through, he was still protective of his little sister. She figured that was fair, but still. She was grown up. She'd dealt with the same shit he'd been through, for the most part. She knew how to take care of herself.

She slid her phone into her pocket and wandered over to her desk. It was cluttered with files, but even in the clutter they seemed to keep a certain organization to them. A computer monitor she didn't often use other than to print out the classified files she was allowed to see glowed in the corner of the desk. Those digital files then joined the rest of the physical clutter. There were a ton of papers and pictures on the desk, but there was a place for everything, and everything had its place.

Claire braced her hands on the edges of the desk and leaned down rather than taking the chair in front of it. She felt too agitated to sit down right now. The fact that she wasn't pacing was something of an anomaly to her, really, and she felt herself gripping the desk harder than she needed to. She softened her grip a bit, the white draining from her knuckles as she did.

She could take care of herself. She always had, really. Of course, you didn't just take care of yourself on Rockfort, did you?

She shook that voice out of her head. She spent a lot of time doing that. She had survived, Chris had survived, they'd stopped Umbrella, and...

Steve didn't survive.

"That's not fair," she said aloud. Her words resonated in the empty room, and she cringed at the desperation in her voice. She released the grip on the side of the desk and stood up straight. She could take care of herself. She made it off of Sushestvovanie Island, too. She'd survived.

But Moira—you left her behind.

Claire clenched a fist and closed her eyes, holding them shut as hard as she could. She slowly unclenched her fist, but her eyes came after, even slower. She hadn't left her behind. She'd needed to, she had to go or she would have died, and so would have Moira. There was…

There was nothing she could do but take care of herself.

She picked up the file in front of her, the one in the center of the desk. It was plain, and it was thin. Many of the high-importance, top-secret files like this that the B.S.A.A. gave her were small. They didn't want any stray pages falling out. They didn't want to give her any more information than they needed to. There was a bit of a stigma there, and she understood, even if she didn't like it. When she'd worked with TerraSave, there were a couple of scandals that made them seem a little more zealous than they really were. That made some of the people around here a little more nervous than they needed to be.

They were doing some things unheard of for people on this side of the bioterrorism fight here, as well, and that was enough to keep anyone on their toes. She paged through the file, looking at the analysis of Leon's most recent training session. It had gone well, all things considering, but that was still not saying much. He'd eliminated the targets and had stayed in control for the whole process. That put him at an 83% success rate, but those odds still made the higher-ups nervous.

It's better than your batting average.

She pushed that voice away, but it was still there, the idea, nagging at her. She hadn't been able to help any of the people in her life. Every time she'd been faced with something, every time she'd had to go up against a biohazard menace, she hadn't been able to help them before the worst happened. And that meant that her batting average was far worse than Leon's.

Then why are they clearing you for duty when they're locking him up?

She threw the file down onto the desk and ran her fingers back through her hair, leaning back down over the mess again. Leon was a hero, in the classical sense, and he had saved people so many times that it had caught up to him, and now he was a monster. It wasn't her fault, it just happened.

He is a monster, isn't he?

"No!" she said aloud. It was a sharp, abrupt utterance that wasn't much louder than a whisper but was loud enough to jolt her into an upright position. He wasn't a monster, he just—he just looked like one. And if other people thought that he was a monster, that he was a weapon, they were wrong.

And what do you think, Claire?

She stood up, reaching across to turn off the computer on her desk as she did. She needed to rest, that was all. She needed to sleep this off before getting back to work. Leon was being trained more and more often lately, and she had been watching all of the sessions. Looking for the places where he kept his composure. Keeping track of the places where he didn't. She wanted to recommend a different training regimen, something that would put him out of such a clinical setting, somewhere that would make him feel more…

Make him feel more human.

Still, she had this nagging, tugging feeling that it wasn't the best thing to do, and that was where this all was coming from, she figured. It had to be that she was just nervous because she had seen the numbers and he had still lost control about a third of the time. He had come too close to the edge—he'd brought himself back, but…

But you think he's a monster. Is he?

She closed the office door behind her with more than a little force.

It was a half a second, and she was back in the base in Antarctica, as if a decade and a half hadn't passed since she had escaped from that frozen rock. And she'd had to leave Steve behind…

She was in the hallway, the one that had seemed out of place then and nothing but eerie now. She shivered, the chill from the dry, frigid air seeping in through the thick concrete that made up the walls of the compound, beneath the ornate facade. She shivered, but she was sire it wasn't just from the cold.

She knew the hallway. She knew what was in that room; she'd relived it in many a nightmare before this one.

That didn't stop her from running, running down this hallway that was, whether she liked it or not, a defining part of her. Plus, there was the hope at the back of her mind, the hope that kept her running every time she found herself back in this hallway: the hope that she could, maybe, get there and change things this time. Maybe this time she could save him.

In the past, every time she'd run down this hallway, it had seemed longer. It had stretched out, delayed her arrival, made it harder for her to get there in time.

This time, however, she got to the door quicker, and it grew larger in her vision much faster than it ever had before—even, she thought, than it had in reality—as she approached.

The door was metal, and when she grasped the handle, it was so cold that it burned. She winced but did not hesitate. She was scared—terrified—of what she would see on the other side of the door, even though she'd seen it a hundred times already.

She could feel her heart in her throat as she pushed open the door. In reality, she and Chris had needed to work together to break it down. Here, it was heavy, but it opened when she pushed it.

At first, she saw nothing in the dark room. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, and at that moment, she wished they just wouldn't, that she would open this door to nothing at all.

Despite that hope, she was faced with the same thing she always saw: Steve, beaten up and bruised. He was pinned to the huge pillar in the center of the room by that damned axe, and he was hurt, infected.

Except that wasn't what she saw, not this time. Her eyes began to adjust to the light and she saw no axe pinning a helpless Steve to the pillar. In fact, she didn't see Steve at all. She thought it was him, at first, but after blinking she saw that it was Leon. Not as he was now, but what he had looked like back in Racoon City in 1998, all fresh in his police blues. He had taken Steve's place, slumped against the column. She ran to him.

"Leon!" she called as she approached. He didn't respond, but he lifted his head to her. He wore that sly grin he always did whenever he cracked a bad joke.

She knelt down next to him and looked at his face. It had been a long time since she'd even thought of Leon like this: young, full of energy, ready to take on the world. Here he was, tangible, alive… human.

She shook her head at that last thought. He still was. On the inside.

But here he was. In front of her, looking like a human, without any of the wings or armor or grotesque body features the C-virus had afforded him. His chest rose and fell steadily, and she placed a hand on her arm.

"Leon, are you okay?"

He didn't answer.

"I'm going to get you out of here. I'm going to help you…"

There was a noise from somewhere outside of the room, the sound of metal on metal, some sort of mechanism clicking to life. She tensed. Silence filled the room again, but she knew something was wrong. The air was stale. It was just like…

Just like with Steve.

Claire could feel a tightening in her chest. It couldn't be this way—she'd made it in time, this time, it wasn't fair…

She turned to the door and then to Leon again, her legs beginning to burn from the squat. The door was tight, and he was okay, though he was still not responding to her. She was about to let her guard down when something flashed across her vision. At first, she thought it was a bullet, but as time slowed down around it and she was able to focus in on it, she could see it for what it really was: a needle. On the side of the needle, she saw, plainly printed, "Umbrella Corporation." But it wasn't just that, because before her eyes, the letters morphed and changed, becoming "WilPharma." She blinked, and as she did the words changed again, this time to "TerraSave."

It was just before the needle caught Leon in the chest, in the same spot where he held a scar from Annette Birkin's gun years ago, that Claire saw the words change one last time: "Claire Redfield."

"No," she gasped audibly, falling backward from her squatting position. She started to scramble to her feet, but it was too late.

Leon began to grow, mutate. It wasn't like it had been back in Lanshiang, not what Helena had described or the body cam footage had shown from the B.S.A.A.—this wasn't a C-virus transformation.

This transformation, it was something else. It was more akin to what she had seen back in Racoon City, in Harvardville, on those islands…

Something in the back of her head told he that it was all because this wasn't real, that it was just in her head, and that was why it was so terrible, so slow, so painful…

That didn't stop her from reaching out before pulling her hands back as Leon's body contorted in front of her. He gasped out in pain, his bones crunching against each other as they reformed, his skin tearing and stretching apart, developing into tough armor through the process of his body being taken apart by the virus, taken apart and put back together again…

His mutation reached the stage it had been when he had first faced Simmons, when he had first turned, and she hoped it would stop there. She didn't waste too much time on the hope that he would stay that way, though, because his face began to split apart, his eye drifting off into other eyes, blood coming down between the cracks in his skin, spattering against the rest of his body as he rose upward. His arms stretched outward, his legs contorting into larger, stronger versions of what they had been, all sharp angles and pain. His back split as the skin and muscles there stretched and pulled outward into the shape of two gargantuan wings that pulled out from around him. As they did, he cried out in something that was somewhere between a moan and a scream. The sound was one of pure anguish, and he cringed in his pain, something that did nothing to assuage it in any fashion.

Claire took a step back. There was nothing she could do as he mutated further, his body pushing itself further than it had ever gone before. His body had been pushed to its limits in Africa, and there was not much more that it could take, she thought—but then again, there was more to the C-virus than she knew, and there was more to Leon than she could ever comprehend. That was why he was the one who was able to save the day, while she was always able to just…

To just save herself.

The armored skin around his face and wings toughened, looking almost as if it were an exoskeleton. Leon winced as he looked down to her, and he lifted his arm to her. His claw, a deformed and terrifying version of what it had once been, caressed her cheek. It was supposed to be calming, it was supposed to make her feel better, and she knew that, but it did nothing of the sort. It made her more nervous, more regretful that she wasn't able to do anything about that. It was her name on the needle, after all. She had caused this, because she couldn't save any of them. She never could.

She didn't see the change in his face until it was too late. This change wasn't one like the other changes, not one that was characterized by the slow and painful shifting of features caused by the virus. This change came in his eyes, the way he looked at her, the space between them more than anything else. It was with that slight narrowing, the focusing of the pupils, the clenching of the tough and armored jaw, that she realized the way his other claw was moving.

It was not until his claw was halfway through her stomach before she felt her blood pouring over his claws, and she knew that it was her doing, anyway, that it was her fault that he was a monster, anyway…

She sat up in a cold sweat, her hair plastered to her forehead, her chest heaving, her sheets kicked off of her and onto the floor. She put a hand to her stomach without even realizing it, and found that it was completely intact, just as it had always been. There was no reason for it to be open, because that was a dream, because she didn't get attacked, because…

"Leon isn't a monster."

She said this aloud, and her voice scared her. She hadn't expected for herself to break the silence, and it took her by surprise. She felt around the side table by her bed for the clock, brushing her hair off of her forehead as she did. The digital screen read 2:43. She sighed and fell backward onto her pillows, feeling the brush of air around her as she did.

It was only moments later that she was out of bed and pulling clothes on, finding her keys and identification before she left her apartment behind.

There weren't many people on duty at the B.S.A.A. base at 3 AM, and that was fine by Claire. She figured that her check-in would probably be monitored, and that she'd get a talking to by O'Brian tomorrow, but that was something she could deal with. It wasn't anything she hadn't dealt with before. It wasn't a big deal. What was a big deal was Leon, and she needed to see him. She needed to be reassured.

She had to swipe through three security checkpoints before she was able to get to his door—they were simply card swipes, but the three-layer authentication was meant to keep out anyone who might not have the authorization but the curiosity to find out what was deep inside the B.S.A.A. base.

She was on a level just above the ones they wanted to keep out, even after hours, it seemed. She assumed Chris had something to do with that, because she knew there were still people at the B.S.A.A. who didn't trust her. Her history was too entwined with Umbrella's, with TerraSave's, for her to be totally trustworthy. She understood, even if she didn't like it. She wasn't sure if she trusted herself, either.

She hesitated for just a moment when she stood in front of Leon's door. She took that moment to convince herself she wasn't still in the dream she'd awoken from twenty minutes before. She knew what she was doing was silly, irrational, and not particularly effective in doing anything productive. But she had to see him, had to know that it wasn't really that way, that he wasn't going to…

Of course he wasn't going to do that. He was a person, same as her. Just a person who hadn't been able to weasel his way out of everything, like she had.

No, he was a person who had been through hell and come back. And that left some scars.

She slid her keycard through the scanner and opened the door when the beep indicated that it had unlocked. She stepped—inside the dark room and realized suddenly how similar it was to the warehouse Leon had initially been kept in when he had first returned from China. It was roomy, and there were plenty of places in the high ceilings for him to perch, if he wanted to. There was a large futon mattress on the far side of the room that had been shaped into a sort of a nest, and she figured that was just because Leon's wings necessitated a certain way of sleeping, a certain tuck of the wings around his body, in order for him to be comfortable.

This struck her as odd, that she was able to notice this at all, because it was three in the morning, and there was no reason for him to not be in his bed. He should have been asleep. She should have been waking him up. He wouldn't have been happy, no, but when he would have seen it was her, he would have softened and seen what he could do about it, probably with his grunting attempts at a snappy comment. That was what she expected.

That was not what was happening, and again she wondered if she was still just in another dream, in another nightmare where the control was taken away from her, as it often was when she got away, but this time she would not survive, she'd be stuck in this endless loop of terrors.

She stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. It was locked at night, she knew, not from the inside but from the outside. This way, they could be sure that no one would get in unless they needed to. Leon's claws couldn't manipulate the cards well enough for them to install any of the card readers to lock the door on his side. That was what they said, anyway, but Claire figured it might have something to do with the fact that they didn't want an unsupervised B.O.W. out on his own in their facility at night. That was why he had no way to get out without someone opening the door.

Not because he was a person, that was for sure. Because the people here, despite the way they spoke to her, knew that he was just a monster.

But she knew he wasn't.

She heard something click on the floor behind her, and she whipped her head around, but she didn't see anything at all. The room had no real light source—just a single dull fixture near the middle of the room, inset to the ceiling. It was either supposed to emulate the moonlight or serve as emergency lighting. It was probably both. In any case, there were plenty of shadows in the room.

She took a few more steps forward, continuing to look around her as she went. Leon had no way out of this room, which meant that he was in here, and that he could probably see and hear her. He had such sharp senses, now that he'd mutated, and she knew that sometimes the training exercises frightened him, overwhelmed his sensitive senses with gunshots or explosions. His eyes in particular were not well suited for bright lights. He could probably see her pretty well now, in the darkness.

"Leon?" she said, her voice catching in the empty room and ricocheting back at her. She shivered and stepped further toward the center. "Leon, I came to see you because…" She didn't know how to finish that sentence, and just let it drop.

"Leon, I just wanted to see you. I…" She hesitated. "I had a nightmare."

She waited a moment in the spot where she was, trying to see if there was any movement around her, something that would indicate that he was there and listening to what she was saying. After the pause, there was still nothing, and she sighed, taking a step forward. "I'm sorry…"

There was a large whoosh as something bigger than her dropped down from the ceiling behind her, causing her to stop in her tracks. She took a breath and turned, forcing her heart to stop beating so damn fast. It was only Leon, there was nothing to be scared of.

And there he was, standing much taller than she was, his jagged face, fractured into pieces, looking down to her, his eyes seeming to glow even in the darkness. She stepped toward him, holding a hand out to his chest, placing it there. "I'm sorry if I woke you up," she finished, her hand almost shaking as she touched the coolness of his leathery skin.

"O…K…" he grunted, his eyes tilting in a way that would have seemed softer, were his face a more normal human configuration. She could see that he had almost smiled before thinking better of it. Helena was the one who had pointed out to him that his smile looked more menacing than comforting, with his rows of sharp teeth and detachable jaw. He'd avoided smiling in sensitive situations since then, understanding the way it might affect others. Because that was the type of person he was, always putting others ahead of him, especially when it mattered. When it really mattered.

"I'm just…" She shook her head. "I'm sorry that I can't save you." As she said this, she knew it wasn't what she meant. The words felt hollow in her mouth. She shook her head.

"I was just feeling…" She swallowed and pulled her hand away from Leon, looking up at his eyes. "I was feeling like I've survived by letting others die, every time, and that I did this to you, not really, I know—it was Simmons—but that I didn't do enough, that I sat by and just like Steve and Moira and…"

Leon held a hand up to her, a motion telling her to stop. She closed her mouth, and immediately regretted letting herself spill like that. She hadn't meant to say all that, to dump all that on him. Leon had been through the same shit she had, and he'd faced it, made it through, and was still dealing with it. She just was whining, feeling sorry for herself, and it wasn't doing him any good. It wasn't doing her any good.

That didn't stop her from feeling that way.

Leon's hand went to her side, holding her in place for a moment. She tensed, the scene from her dream playing over in her head. His claws against her stomach, his claws inside of her stomach…

But he withdrew his hand and she looked up to him. She didn't have to look far, because he was bending down to see her, to be eye level with her. Her eyes met his, and she cracked a half a smile. He let himself form something of a smile, as well, and she reached her hands up to his neck, pulling his head closer, touching her forehead to his. She held it there for a moment, feeling him with her, trusting him as he trusted her.

He trusted her to help with the B.S.A.A., just as he'd trusted her all the way back in Raccoon City. He trusted her in Harvardville. He trusted her, despite the fact that she'd survived without him, despite the fact she felt she couldn't be trusted. He felt comfortable with her when even she didn't feel comfortable with herself. They had been through too much to not.

And she wondered where she'd ever gotten off losing her trust in him. She placed her hand on his shoulder and turned her face toward him. "Thank you," she whispered, just loud enough for him to hear with his enhanced senses.

He grunted something in response, but she could see the grotesque, too-wide, toothy smile spread across his face.

She was wrong, she realized at three in the morning, deep within a B.S.A.A. base with her best friend, biomutated into a larger, armored version of himself—they were both survivors.