eshajun

You think loud, rookie. Waiting for the dead to finish what they started in Raccoon City?" he heard the Major Krauser bark in his ear through the steady hum of the overhead ventilator.   

Leon focused on the order in his head before his thoughts could lead him astray, gathering himself like shattered pieces scattered across the floor. His eyes were closed, like they always were. He had shuttered himself behind the blank dark of his eyelids, letting the shards of memory replay in a disjointed sequence while he breathed in and out, until the strict rhythm became the only thing his body knew how to heed. 

  "Then come, Sancho Panza! Let us rescue the Princess Dulcinea!"   

A broken smile twitched at his mouth when Luis Serra's playful remark cut through his focus. The unprompted memory reached a place the pain in his body couldn't touch, and he held the fragment close to his heart like something precious as he lowered his frame down. 

  "Come on, six more sets," he whispered. 

  He stilled himself through the effort, with embers sweltering in his lungs. 

  His triceps and obliques scorched like hellfire the longer he held his chest close to the abrasive floor. The savage brilliance of the fluorescent light wrapped his naked, dampened back, where three long, thick scars from healed lacerations glistened pale beneath it. They bore the horrors that would never leave him, even if they had long since stopped itching like they used to.       His muscle memory of his peak physique flickered awake the moment he told it what he needed it to do. It listened to his call, and there he was, pushing himself to his absolute limits to fill the twenty-three hours of the day that imprisoned him in their passage.   

And he'd come too damn far in such little time. 

  "Leon, we are gonna be okay, right?"   

Sherry called out to him before he could brace himself. Her little hand squeezed his while they stood outside the old hotel room for the night after escaping Raccoon City. Her small face was tense with fear, her eyes shimmering when the light touched them. 

  He wrung his eyelids dry and held his breath in his exhausted lungs while he remained fixed in his high plank. He silently counted each breath through the blazing pain radiating across his shoulders and diaphragm, alongside the aching reminiscence etched into his psyche. 

  Five breaths in. Five breaths out. Slow and even.