Synopsis: You, a die-hard Leon fan, find yourself compelled to play through the events of Resident Evil 4 Remake for the 23947654th time. But this time, there's something... wrong, with your game. And now the screen you observe Leon's world through isn't a one-way view.
Word Count: 1.7k
CW: Mentions of blood, canon-typical violence, cursing, Leon dropping terrible (amazing) one-liners. Let me know if I miss anything!
I hope you all enjoy my first chapter! If you have any comments, ideas, critiques, or catch any spelling errors, please let me know! I love seeing interactions with my posts of any kind!!
No matter how many times you played through the game, there was something just so… mesmerizing about the home screen of Resident Evil 4 Remake. You could just sit and listen to the ambiance of it for hours, (and admittedly, you had. Sometimes you were forced to spend your free time working on college assignments, rather than playing your beloved game. So, to satiate your all-consuming need to be interacting with Resident Evil media in one way or another at all times, you’d start up the game, and just listen to the title screen sounds as you worked. Yes, you knew you had problems. Your main problem being that Leon Kennedy wasn’t real. No, you would not get therapy. Therepy was expensive. Re4R was 40 dollars, and infinitely replayable.)
But now… you were finally doing it. You were gonna sit down, and finally unlock those damn cat ears. You didn’t even really like how they looked on him, but goddamn did they call to you anyways. Plopping down into your plush gaming chair, you booted the game on, screen whirring to life as you sent up a prayer to Leon, begging for forgiveness before you had even clicked on ‘New Game.’ So many needless deaths, just so you could have a cosmetic item. The things you did for memes and jokes was astounding, and there could probably be a medical paper written for the unholy obsession you had with the blonde protagonist of these games. However, you didn’t have the time nor the patience. The cat ears were waiting for you. Not to mention, you were trying to 100% the game, get all the trophies, that sort of thing. Leon would probably despise you for it, just because of how many times he was going to die to scratch that perfectionist itch you had.
The thought made you chuckle.
Your hand hovered over the ‘New Game’ button for a moment, a pit opening up in your stomach. You hadn’t played professional mode before. You knew you were going to die a lot, and would probably rage quit more than once. Not to mention, the whole run had a time limit on top of a limited number of saves, so you had to be actually good at the game to get an S+ ranking.
Were the cat ears really worth hours, maybe even days of your free time for the foreseeable future? Especially when you weren’t ever even planning to wear them, or any of the other cosmetics you collected?
…Yes. Yes they were.
So with that thought in mind, you select professional as your difficulty, and wait for the intro to begin.
But there was something… off.
For a second, your screen froze. You froze alongside it, not sure what was happening. The initial cutscene just seemed… different. The sacrifice of the girl felt more… brutal. Realistic. Bloody. And then, the priest, the one who had been chanting, turned, and looked you dead in the eye. Or at least, it felt like he did, as he looked into the camera. Goosebumps prickled at your skin, and you had to fight to calm your heart down. Before you could even begin to try and rationalize what was happening, your screen froze again, a message written in bloody pixels stretching across your monitor.
‘Ángel de la guarda, recibe nuestra bendición más sagrada...,’
The words flash before your eyes, in a language you can weakly assume to be Spanish, considering where the game takes place, but still. What- what was happening? This wasn’t part of the normal introduction. Maybe this was just a special add-on for when you play professional mode? You don’t get the chance to question anything further, when your screen unfreezes and begins Leon’s monologue. And when the scene finally shifted to Leon, sitting in the back of the police car, you let out a sigh you hadn’t realized you were holding in.
“It’s just a video game, calm down,” you mutter to nothing in particular. There wasn’t any reason to be so stressed about a video game. You were just nervous about the harder difficulty. That was all.
It was just a video game. There was nothing wrong.
Nothing wrong at all.
The sound of Leon getting out of the cop car pulls you from your daze, and you begin to play the game, setting his character into a sprint as you bolt for the Hunter’s lodge, quickly triggering the cutscene with the first Ganado. Everything plays out exactly as you remember it.
So what was up with the intro…?
You shake your head, continuing your mad dash downstairs, where you find the dead cop. The sight is familiar, almost desensitizing, because it was truthfully a bloody scene. The man was covered in a thick layer of his own red, with deep, brutal gashes cutting and carving the symbol of the Los Iluminados deep into the flesh of his chest, his once-white undershirt left in filthy ribbons.
Had you simply not noticed that before? How brutalized the poor man was?
You probably had just missed it. It’s not like you were exactly the most detail-oriented person in the world (Translation, you had been staring at Leon’s sculpted back instead of the dead police officer.)
Still, the sight just seemed… gory.
And again, you brush it off. It was a Resident Evil game. Gore wasn’t exactly the most shocking thing to find. You go to have Leon turn away from the man and towards the stairs, when a small icon appears on the screen, indicating for you to pick something up. You pick up the item, and watch in bewilderment as Leon’s character model puts what appears to be a necklace around his neck. You pause the game immediately, scouring your inventory and the accessories section of the pause menu. Nothing. No indication of the necklace. No acknowledgement that the thing hanging around Leon’s neck was even real.
Weird.
You were so caught up in your confusion, trying to find a way to access an item description, that you forgot about the Ganado coming down the stairs, his neck hanging at an inhuman degree. And you watch in horror as it eats up more of your bullets than you anticipated, even with all of them being perfect headshots.
Oh no.
You were going to die a lot.
A small whine of despair escapes you, but you keep pushing on. The hunter’s lodge was easy enough to escape, considering all the enemies were easy enough to dodge, and you find yourself surrounded by the villagers of the Hunter’s lodge.
“I’ll let myself out!” You hum, in sync with Leon as he throws himself out the window.
“Leon, you really need to stop jumping out of windows, your knees are going to hate you in thirty years,” you laugh quietly to yourself, a small smile playing at your lips.
Leon’s head tilts back as if to give you a look.
“Don’t look at me like that,” you mutter, your brow furrowing at the model on screen. Such a sassy bunch of pixels.
You push Leon’s character into a sprint, dread building in your gut. The village wasn’t that difficult in the grand scheme of the game, but you were faced with the choice between trying to kill enough villagers to cut your time short, and possibly kill Salvadore for his emerald…
But you’d have nothing but your handgun and the shotgun.
“Fuck it, I need the cash.”
You were going to get that rocket launcher no matter what.
Skipping past the cutscene of the second police officer being burned alive, you gunned it straight to the left to grab the green herb, before trying, and failing, to sneak around the rest of the village to get more supplies.
That led to your first death.
Your second death was to Doctor Salvadore. The death animation was brutal, and you looked away from the screen, wincing in sympathy for Leon as he was run straight through with a chainsaw.
All you could manage was to mutter a small apology for the pain.
Your third death was bullshit. You’d managed to sneak to one of the single room huts on the outer edge of the village, looting it for what it had, only for one of the Ganados to somehow see you through the wall, and alert the entire village to your location, where you were then body-blocked and subsequently beaten to death.
A groan escapes your lips, and you let your head fall into your hands, rubbing your brows. Had you always been this awful at the game? Was Professional really that much harder than Normal, or even Hardcore? Why were you even doing this again? For some cat ears you were never going to use?
With a sigh, you move to close out your game. That was enough for tonight. You had classes in the morning, and getting some actually decent sleep for once sounded very, very needed.
So needed, that you were sure you were seeing things when your eyes flickered up to your screen, and you saw Leon’s character staring right at you. You blinked slowly, squinting at the screen in an almost judgemental manner.
“Leon… god, I must be going insane,” You mutter, rubbing your eyes.
There’s a moment of silence, both in game and the real world, and you suck in a slow breath. Only for a voice to shatter that quiet.
“How do you know my name?”
‘Ex-fucking-scuse me?’
Your head snaps up at near bone-shattering speeds, your eyes zeroing in on Leon. That had been his voice. That had been Leon’s voice.
Asking how you knew his name…?
Surely you were hearing things.
“Haha… Leon… yeah I gotta be going crazy. There’s no way you can hear me. That’d just be impossible.”
The blondie’s crystal blue eyes narrow, and he looks around the screen in what would have been your general vicinity if you had been standing next to him.
“Yeeh, I can hear you, now show yourself,” He mutters, hands twitching for his gun.
You can only stare at the screen, dumbfounded.
“Wait, what the fu-”
Translation: Guardian Angel, receive our most sacred blessing. (I used google translate, please for the love of god if someone reading this can Speak/read/write Spanish, PLEASE HELP ME-)
