ooh what about 19 for the ask game? 👀 (not sure if you’re after characters/a ship too but anything with Leon would be 👌👌)
Hi, hello! Sorry I took so long to write this, it kind of got away from me ;-; but I hope you like it! This is another one of my many AU’s that rotate in my brain, a mix of The Magnus Archives and Resident Evil :3 I think Leon would be very Lonely coded :D I mean… if any of the eldritch fears would choose him, it would definitely be the Lonely. Enjoy :D
19. Vulnerable
Vulnerability is weakness.
That’s one of the first lessons his dad beats into him.
The second lesson he learns is how to read his dad’s mood and avoid getting into situations that cause his dad to beat him.
That one takes a while, but he gets it down.
---
A lesson he learns on his own is how to be okay with being alone.
The kids at school aren’t particularly nice to him. He’s not sure why, but he learns to live around it. Books and the shaded area under a tree during recess become his friends instead of people.
It’s during this isolation when it happens the first time.
The world starts to get quiet. It’s so gradual that it takes Leon a few minutes to notice it. He looks up, blinking at the sight of fog draping the playground. It’s quiet now, silent. Eerie.
“Hello?” Leon calls out, voice shaking slightly. It’s cold.
As soon as he speaks, though, the fog clears up. Sound is back, loud in face of the previous silence.
Kids are talking and yelling over by the park. Nobody else seems bothered by the sudden appearance and disappearance of the fog. Or the absence of sound. He brushes it off for the moment, going back to his book.
When he asks one of his peers later, they stare at him blankly, saying there was no fog. It’d been midday and sunny, there couldn’t have been any.
He tries to put it out of his mind after that.
---
Except it keeps happening.
Nobody ever notices it, but it’ll creep in and leave Leon alone.
The quiet and the cold, a bone-deep chill, always makes itself known gradually, creeping into the few peaceful moments he gets a day.
He hates it. But he gets used to it.
The place is unnerving at best, terrifying at worst. There is no sound, just the fog drifting through. Sometimes, breathing it in feels like inhaling smoke. Cloying, sticking, and making Leon want to cough it out somehow.
It’s lonely.
(But, each time it happens, Leon feels an odd sense of belonging. Leon’s always been lonely. This place just allows him to truly be alone. Nothing, not one person to bring him back to Earth. Just himself.)
Those thoughts scare Leon more than anything, and he speaks.
---
His dad gets sick.
He’s alone more often than he isn’t.
He drops out of school, works, and takes care of his dad. He’s no longer getting beat, so he spends more time in his room, only coming out every so often to make sure his dad hasn’t hurt himself somehow.
The fog appears more and more.
Leon gets more and more comfortable when it does.
---
He applies for an archiving job. It’s dumb of him, his resume is forged, and he’s positive that man interviewing him knows. His eyes are blue, but they seem wrong, somehow. He can’t for the life of him put his finger on it, though.
He’s surprised, to say the least, when the man, Wesker, that’s his name, offers him the job right there. There’s an amused smile on his face, but Leon is too busy feeling relieved that he wasn’t caught in his lie to notice.
He signs whatever paperwork Wesker gives him but pauses at the very last one. It feels… it feels like a trap. But he needs the job, so he signs it.
Something heavy settles in his soul, but he shrugs the feeling off. He’s thinking about it too much.
---
His coworkers are nice. Especially Chris. Leon is… good with people, he thinks.
(At least, he’s good at reading people. Interacting takes some more time before he can figure out how to hold himself and what jokes he can make. These lessons he’s learned from dealing with his father and other adults. It took a while for him to apply it to people his age.)
Chris, though, makes him feel off-balance. Like he’s been put on stage and asked to perform with no other context. He always feels like he’s doing something wrong around him.
Even with all of that, though, he finds himself feeling a little less lonely.
---
The fog rarely appears nowadays. He’s been dating Chris for a few months and has been introduced to his sister and her friends. The careful guard he had built up over the years had slowly dissolved with the warmth that they showed him. It’s… nice.
It’s nicer when whatever fuckery that was going on in the Archives stops.
Leon has seen a horror too many in that job. Flesh-eating maggots, clones of his friends taking over their life, killer clowns, etc. All of it is gone now.
And that stupid contract? Well, burnt to a crisp, according to Luis.
Good fucking riddance.
---
One of the first lessons he learned with Chris Redfield is that he’s allowed to be vulnerable. He’s allowed to be sad when his dad dies, he’s allowed to be angry at things that happen to him, and he’s allowed to cry when everything gets to be too much.
He’s allowed all that, and even allowed to have Chris hold him when he finally breaks down.
It’s not a lesson he sticks to all the time, but he’s getting better at it.
Plus, with Chris here, he doubts it’ll be one he’s allowed to forget.
He’s kind of happy about that, if he’s being honest.
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