oh hey don’t mind me just gonna leave this here cheers
hope you don’t mind, @polarspaz , that I sort of took what you wrote in this post and ran with it
disclaimer is that I don’t know anything about anything (bloodborne) and am simply here for the vibes. ✌️
—
The last coherent thing that runs through Leon’s mind is that he should have brought the painters mask at the hardware store.
It looks stupid, but if it blocks paint particles with respirator filters, it could probably block out at least some of the smell of infection, so it could be pink polka-dotted for all he cared.
Now because he didn’t want to show up at DSO HQ looking like a serial killer with a side gig, everything is screwed.
—
Sherry is huddled under a desk. Someone’s desk, doesn’t matter who. Probably Harris, based on the ergonomic footrest she kicked across the room while all eyes were elsewhere. But the important part is that she’s hiding underneath a desk, on the ground with a rats nest of computer cables and the vague scent of cigarettes.
She’s bleeding from the thigh, her neck is cramping, and she’s nearly holding her breath as the room goes way too quiet. There’s an animal snuffling, she can hear panting and shifting and the quiet drag of severed limbs on berber carpeting and old laminate, a sound Sherry wishes desperately she couldn’t identify from childhood. The perils of an eidetic memory.
Something cracks and crunches. Might be bone, might be a chair. Probably a chair, from how dry it sounds. The half-formed shadows move along the floor, and just a bit up the wall from where a desk lamp has landed.
She hadn’t been there, but she saw the footage. She heard from Jill and Chris and a handful of soldiers with the BSAA about what happened the first time. There was a second, just a second, right before her leg got cut by one of the Hunters, that she’d looked over and seen Leon legitimately drooling. His stubble was actively growing, and when he grimaced and wiped his chin, his fingers were just this side of claws.
Shit luck with infected father figures, whispers the little voice in her head that sounds vaguely like Jake Muller. It’s even another office building.
Sherry suppresses a hysteric giggle, well aware it would get her killed sooner rather than later. But really, the odds are astronomical. The Birkin luck is just that bad.
At least he probably won’t remember this, she tells herself. Jill and Claire both said that he had almost no memory of it, last time it happened. He’ll blame himself, because he always does, but maybe he’ll get to skip the details in favor of the outcome.
A huge set of claws curls around the lip of the desk, lifting it and throwing it to the opposite wall in one quick motion, startling a scream out of Sherry.
He looked different, on the body cams and security video, the last time Leon turned into this… thing. A ‘Beast,’ as he so insistently says. He looks enormous, only highlighted by the fact she’s curled up on the floor while he’s looming even halfway to dragging his knuckles.
Shaggy brown fur shot with gray, just like his hair, with a vaguely canine snout and a twitching snarl twisting his lip. A t-shirt hangs in tatters, torn from the sheer circumference of his torso, and those jeans are truly hanging onto his modesty for dear life. His expression is hollow, blue-gray eyes lacking any of the warmth or intelligence they normally carry. The lights are on, but Leon’s not home anymore.
Well shit. Dying at work is a family tradition, apparently, not that she could have guessed the context with a gun to her head.
Oh right, her gun, she should have that. Where did it go? Somewhere? That might be the barrel peeking out from underneath the mangled bloody corpse of a hunter. Yeah, no, that’s definitely her gun. And it’s definitely not in reach.
The honed analytical side of Sherry’s mind points out that she’s in shock, having a trauma response, and that really she should be a bit more worked up about this whole situation. The rest of her mind is busy gibbering about generational cycles and fathers and werewolves, so it doesn’t point out much anything of consequence.
“Leon, please,” she whispers as he raises a set of wicked black claws, each one easily the length of her arm. “Dad. Don’t do this.”
The record will not show Sherry Birkin as a coward. She takes a steadying breath as claws lift, poised to carve her in half, and she looks him in the face with the best smile she can muster. She looks her death in the eye and waits.
That’s really the only reason she spots it. Her intent stare catches the barest shred of downward motion of his arm and braces for impact, only for Leon to jerk suddenly in place like someone stuck him with a cattle prod. Half a second later, his arm drops back to his side and he takes a step… backwards.
The light snaps back on behind his eyes as the snarl dies in his throat, face twisting. Sherry knows that expression, too, traumatized and overwhelmed and so far out of his depth he needs the coast guard for a rescue. It’s the same look he had the first night they met, on the tram out of Nest, a petrified rookie cop who’d seen entirely too much.
“Leon?” she repeats quietly.
He looks horrified, eyes jumping from her leg to her face to her empty holster to his own bloody hands. Leon takes another step backwards, and another, and another. He stumbles over some gore on the floor (it looks like most of an intestine, her brain supplies) and slams his back against the wall behind him.
—
From Leon’s perspective, one minute he’s thinking about the painter’s mask, the next he’s snapping back into his own body, not that it looks like his at the moment.
It takes his brain a couple seconds to fully reboot, so he really only registers a flash of… whatever it is. A pop of color, faded maroon and washed-out gold, with the faint scents of underground humidity and cigarettes.
Then the moment passes, and Leon is behind the steering wheel fully again. He drops his raised arm as quickly as he can, retreating from Sherry like she’s the dangerous one in this situation. Like she hasn’t lost her gun somewhere in the scuffle, like she’s the one standing over him with an arm full of razors ready to fall.
He nearly trips, and the stumble sends his back slamming into the wall. The corner of a filing cabinet digs into his spine, and he grimaces before he fully drops to the floor.
He nearly killed her.
He nearly killed her.
He nearly killed Sherry.
Who the hell knows what stopped him, what brought him slamming back from LaLa land, or wherever his mind had been, but he just came way too close to doing something he would have begged for a bullet over.
Leon turns to the side and throws up on the floor.
