Mastermind!Leon BUT Mikan falls for him (the way she fell for Junko). He turns up the charm by a fuckton, and she genuinely believed that he loved her. (He might've convinced himself that he did too.)
oh. ow.
Leon was a master manipulator, including with girls. He had everything planned for his killing game, including an inside in the class that would be above his- Mikan.
Maybe part of it was the head games, but Mikan truly believed that she loved Leon. He wasn’t like the other people in her life; she was blind to his obvious red flags.
Mikan had her uses to him. She was a resource, and that was all. That she would do anything for him didn’t hurt. He even found it more normal that she would text him all the time, asking what she could do or when she could see him.
Maybe part of him thought that he loved her, too, and that was how he kept her strung along. Either way, he had to recognize that at the end of the day, she was a liability. Just a temporary resource.
Mikan’s classmates only knew that she was talking to someone in the year below them who would be at Hope’s Peak when they were second years. They had no idea how deep she had gotten herself…
