Bug Hell Now

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Sherry has never been this scared before.

First, her mother had called her at school to go home and stay inside, no matter what, and when Sherry asked about dad, her mother ended the call. And then she watched the city go to shit - "Language, Sherry!" - from the window of her second floor bedroom while she waited. Sherry set a new record in lemmings. And tetris. She finished her homework assignments, all of them. She played through all of Super Mario. Twice. She ate an extra big portion of chocolate cereal and made hot cocoa to the sound of sirens. She cooked mac 'n' cheese from the box mix when the housekeeper wouldn't come and watched the city go to shit some more. "Language, Sherry!" she had told herself in the voice of Mario - the teddy wearing her red elementary school cap. It was a bit childish, but no one was here and she was bored to hell.

And scared.

Three days in, a police van drove by, late at night. Sherry had stayed up long past her bedtime, eating popcorn while the TV in her room played some music ranking late night show to drown out the sirens."Attention all citizens. Due to the citywide outbreak, you are advised to take shelter at the Raccoon City police station. Free food and medical supplies will be provided to everyone in need."

There had been something dad had told her, a few weeks ago, that if things got bad, really really world-endingly bad, she was to go to the police station and find the chief. He would get her out of Raccoon City, dad had arranged for that. But! She must never tell him about the locket or its purpose. Sherry wasn't stupid, she knew what that meant.

But she had made her way to the police station, tip-toeing past zombies - again, she was twelve, not stupid, she knew what a zombie was and that they shouldn't be real - and she found the chief of police while he was dumping a young man's body. All Sherry could see was the blond hair, the head wound - blunt force trauma the crime series she was not supposed to watch would call it - and the blue jeans and white sneaker combination that glowed in the cone of the chief's flashlight. Sherry had cowered down out of sight, hands pressed over her mouth and then she hid.

Sherry had gotten real good at hiding last year.

That's where she is now, in a hiding place in some storage room. She had shoved a few boxes together to provide a better hiding place and her jacket is spread out on the ground to keep her from freezing her butt off. "You'll get a bladder infection if you sit on the cold ground too long," had been a frequent chorus for as long as she could remember.

Sherry can't tell how much time passes that way, so she starts counting her breaths. A human breathes on average twenty times a minute, she read that somewhere, so every hundred breaths are five minutes, meaning that every one thousand and two hundred breaths are an hour. She loses count somewhere around three hundred, so she starts all over again. There's not much to do here, curled up in her hiding place while the cold from the floor seeps through her jacket and school uniform into her bones.

A human has two hundred and six bones. She read that, too, and she had tried to learn them all from biggest to smallest to become a doctor, so she could see her parents at work. Femur, Sherry starts.

She dozes off at some point, because the last she remembers, she was listing all the metacarpals, but she wakes from a shuffling sound. She's hungry, she's thirsty and she can hear something moving outside the room she's hiding in.

Heavy footsteps like the chief.

And something dragging behind.

Sherry gasps very quietly and immediately curls up tighter, covering her hair with the jacket. What if he heard her? Shallow breaths, Sherry. Quiet and shallow breaths through the mouth. Become invisible.

The door opens with a click and the heavy footsteps continue. They make a scratching noise on the stone floor and the dragging sound continues on, too.

Then they stop.

Sherry keeps herself as still and small as possible while beyond the wall of boxes the footsteps pick up again, going away from her. There is a deep huff of breath from something big, like a horse, and then the shuffling sounds of something settling down.

The cardboard boxes she's hiding behind are partially empty and the bottom flaps aren't aligned perfectly, allowing Sherry to look outside from within her hideout without moving. She can't make out a lot, but it's not the chief. It's not a zombie either and not one of those things crawling around with an exposed brain.

She can see that it's big, even sitting hunched over. There's a tail curled around its legs covered in big scales. No, Sherry decides. A carapace that's all white like bones. Some parts are coloured blue, though. It's a bit blurry to watch it through the cardboard slit, but she can make out blue parts, too. A bug then, Sherry thinks. A very very very big bug.

But the bug doesn't move and neither does Sherry. As far as monsters go, the bug is not that bad so far. But then, spiders - and she knows those aren't bugs, but bugs don't have a tail with a stinger either - will wait hours and hours for prey to walk into striking range.

After an eternity, her stomach rumbles.

Sherry scrambles to her feet, all ready to run from the bug monster, but it also just gets up and looks at her like it knew where she was all along. Her heart's beating in her throat. Once it moves towards her, she'll be able to slip past it and through the door and she readies herself-

Instead the bug gestures for her to go back behind the boxes and makes a series of clacking and chittering sounds. Then it turns, tail whacking heavy folders from a shelf - causing the bug to pause in a posture that Sherry thinks is frustration - and leaves, ducking deeply to fit through the door, closing it behind itself.

Sherry finds a new hiding place. The bug hadn't attacked her before, but, well, it was a monster and she was in a monster situation. She'd read enough to know that kids that trusted the monsters were the first to die. Don't take gifts from witches, don't get into car with strangers and don't trust the big bug monster not to eat you.

The clock tower is very dusty and someone must have known this was a good hiding place because there's a package of cigarettes and an ashtray stashed here. Up here it's a lot quieter and the floor is wood so it's not as cold. She's still hungry, but as long as she curls up and counts breaths, she doesn't notice it as much.

But she feels when something enters the clock tower, the heavy steps being carried through the wood right into her ear. And then she hears the scratching. Scratch, step, scratch, step, thud. That's got to be the tail hitting something.

The bug has found her again.

And she's trapped up here.

Sherry retreats into the very last corner, even though she knows it won't help. The bug knew where she was in that storage room, too. It can probably hear her already. Her heartbeat definitely feels loud enough in her own ears.

Scratch, step, thud, scratch, step, thud she hears over the creaking of the wooden stairs. Quiet. More creaking. Then the shuffling sounds of the bug sitting down, tail sliding over the ground until its curled up around itself. Sherry can make out its silhouette, hunching uncomfortably by the stairs, in the dim light. Its eyes are shimmering blue, reflecting the bit of light there is like a cat's eyes.

Things are dropped by the bug. Something crinkling like plastic, something heavier, liquid like a bottle and something heavy and solid. Three things get shoved into Sherry's direction as far as the bug can push them and then it turns away. Demonstratively, it turns its back to Sherry as though to signal that it is not interested in her and not a threat to her and the whole thing would be more effective if it wasn't taller and broader than even Sherry's PE teacher and brought its tail towards Sherry with that movement.

It sits a bit like a human, like one of Sherry's classmates if she's honest. Legs on the stairs, hunched over and rustling about with a plastic bag of its own.

Sherry considers her situation. That makes a good scientist, her parents had told her. Thorough observation, rational analysis, well thought out conclusion. And then lots of experiments to test it all. Observation is simple. She's trapped with no way out, she's hungry, there's items that the bug brought and shoved in her direction, the bug is not looking at her. Analysis is a bit harder because Sherry's no expert on bugs especially not big, humanoid ones. But it's clear that the bug could have caught her if it wanted, even downstairs when she hid behind the boxes. It had given every indication that it brought that food - that's what she assumes those items are, stolen from one of the vending machines downstairs - specifically for her and doesn't mean any harm to her. It's even attempting to appear non-threatening. All signs point to the bug not being a danger to her. Now, it could be a trap or it could be a strategy to fatten her up like the witch in the fairytale, but... Sherry's really hungry and she can worry about that later.

Quickly, Sherry darts from her corner, picks up the items and immediately retreats with her prize. the bug only throws her a quick glance and makes a clicking sound. It's not moving towards her, in fact it seems to concentrate even harder on its own... food? It all reminds Sherry a lot of that stray cat near the school she'd tried to catch once before she was forbidden from having a pet. Don't look, don't act like you're interested, prove that you're not a threat and bring food. Just that Sherry is the stray cat this time.

Sherry's haul consists of three things. A flashlight, a bag of chips and a bottle of gatorade. Half the bottle goes down in one gulp because more than hungry she's been very thirsty. The chips don't survive long either and get washed down with the rest of the gatorade. Not what her nanny would have called a healthy meal, but Sherry doesn't care about that right now.

The bug is still rustling about with its bag and has started to make a low chirring sound of utter frustration while Sherry devoured her food. She bites her lips and points the flashlight at the bug and its misery. Yep, that's a bag of toffees its trying to open with its clawed hands and, Sherry guesses, while trying to avoid that all the toffees spill everywhere. The bug is definitely clever. Sherry has classmates that still haven't grasped that. "I- I can help," Sherry offers before she can think better of it. But... the bug brought her food, it's only right that she returns the favour. "J-just don't eat me?"

The bug chitters and it almost sounds like a laugh while its dark-brown face mask - oh, that was not a mask - splits open and reveals... that's got to be the mouth. And those are a lot of sharp teeth and lots of mandibles, too. It tosses Sherry the bag in a surprisingly human motion.

Maybe not that surprising. As Sherry catches the bag, her flashlight flickers erratically across the bug's form and what she thought had been blue carapace before turns out to be clothes. Torn apart and stretched thin across the pale carapace, but unmistakably clothes. Blue shirt, jeans... Its eyes also glow blue while reflecting the light.

Sherry tears the bag open at the seam and, oh, there's a problem. "These are all wrapped," she explains to the bug. "I... don't think you can unwrap them?"

The bug looks at its own hands, three dark-brown claws longer than Sherry's radius, then shrugs at the obviousness of its problems with that.

"You're not going to eat me, are you?"

The bug points at the bag of toffees first, then at its own mouth.

"You want the sugar," Sherry translates. "I guess that makes sense since you're a bug monster." Sherry puts the first unwrapped toffees into the bug's hands and watches as they immediately vanish in the bug's mouth. This time she can see it more clearly, how all the pieces flare out, the lower jaw completely splitting open, and then the mandibles snap shut around its bounty and the bug closes its eyes as it seems to savour the taste. "Were you human?" It feels a bit redundant to ask, but it would be nice to have confirmation.

The bug nods.

"How did you- Do you know how you turned into a big bug?"

The bug shakes its head.

Sherry keeps unwrapping toffees that are eaten very quickly and without gluing the bug's teeth together like they'd do whenever Sherry tried them. At the same time she keeps asking questions that the bug answers in nods or shakes of its head. Can you speak? No. Are you a boy? Yes. Do you eat only sugar? Shrug. A shrug looks pretty weird when it's done by a tall bug monster. But you don't eat humans? Enthusiastic nod that has the blond hair shake with the motion. Are you a good monster then? Yes and a shrug which Sherry translates to "I suppose." Fair enough. If she got turned into a bug monster, she wouldn't know whether that makes her a good monster. "I guess you're like the X-Men. Or, like, the mutants in the comics in general and it depends on what you do with your powers."

The bug chitters, mandibles flaring open once more and this time Sherry is sure that he's laughing at her.

"Do you have a name?" she asks, handing the last of the toffees over. "I can't keep calling you just bug, right?"

The bug nods, makes a series of chirping and clicking sounds and snaps his mouth shut, shoulders slumping.

"Yeah, I don't think I can say that."

Suddenly, the bug jumps to his feet, startling Sherry which sends the flashlight from between her knees clattering all over the floor until its stopped by the bug's claws. The bug holds out the flashlight in one hand and the other in... invitation?

The bug's carapace is warm as Sherry holds onto him. It doesn't feel as hard as she thought it would be, almost leathery in fact. This close she can see that it's not really white either, or at least not white through any effect other than being thick enough to appear so, because she can make out the shapes of the moving muscles beneath the carapace while the bug is running through the station with her on his back.

They come across zombies, of course, and some of the crawling, skinless things, but where Sherry had been forced to sneak around, the bug just kills them. It's... it's a lot of blood and... things, but the bug makes sure that nothing reaches her even when he smashes a zombies head apart by whipping it into a wall with his tail while trying to cover her eyes. Sherry is terrified, but at the same time she's so glad that the bug is protecting her. He's definitely a good monster, she decides.

Sherry has a hard time telling where exactly they are in the station until they pass the big statue in the main hall, but then they duck into another corridor. Well, the bug has to duck very low and Sherry just holds on and prays she doesn't hit her head on a doorframe. And ducking again.

The bug makes a noise, one that vibrates through the leathery plates of carapace on his back and sits down which Sherry thinks is the signal for her to get off. They're in an office now, she sees, pointing her flashlight here and there. There are no people here and no corpses either. Several desks and-

Oh.

Sparkling streamers are taped to the ceiling and there's a banner hung across the desks, all made from cut out circles and letters. "Welcome, Leon," Sherry reads, turning to the bug. It nods and points at the banner. "Your name is Leon?" The bug nods again. "OK, Mister Leon, it's very nice to meet you. I'm Sherry." She holds out her hand, because that's what one does when introducing oneself and she's been really rude so far by not doing so.

Two mandibles rise up to the bug's, no, to Leon's eyes and he carefully returns the offered handshake. For the first time since all this started, Sherry's not feeling scared at all.

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I might write more for this since writing came with the side effect of thinking a lot about the whole scenario. I couldn't really get into Leon's whole deal, but suffice to say that he arrived earlier than in canon and stumbled over the orphanage instead of the police station first.

For Sherry I imagine she was a pretty lonely kid with mostly adults as contact and lacking socialization with peers leading to her diverging in tone and expression from what would be typical for her age. I mean, her parents were at best pretty distant and there'd have been a lot of things she couldn't have done with classmates, meaning she wouldn't have ended up hated per se, but as the outsider that everyone got along okay with but who was nobody's friend.

Fun fact: while looking up what she could have been playing to distract herself, I checked pokemon first (of course. it's pokemon) and that had its first release in the US on the 28th of September in 1998, so exactly during the Raccoon City Outbreak.

Why Leon doesn't look full verdugo is very simply based on the fact that his plaga had to go through with the metamorphosis on the biomass of one healthy young male and little else and growing a whole tail and carapace? Yeah, best the plaga could do in that first step was a kinda caterpillar state, send Leon on a search for sugar (chitin synthesis needs so. much. sugar.) and prioritize what it needs to survive this mess. Ergo, lots of that chitin didn't end up sclerotized and chitin itself is tough, but pliable... and colourless. the sclerotized parts are the ones that have a darker colour. So mouth parts, claws and stinger? those are all important. The rest of the carapace is not unimportant per se, but its current tough but pliable state is good enough against human teeth and licker tongues. Pigmentation? Pretty unimportant. Oh, and he wouldn't be full verdugo size yet either. Taller than a normal human, but definitely not the 8 to 10 feet he'll reach as a fully grown verdugo.

Yeah, Leon's going through a full proper molt after Raccoon City and after a bit of a sugar binge... and then his plaga would like a break, please.

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Consciousness arrives slowly and mercilessly drags him back from the void into awareness. For a moment all that Leon - that's his name, he's Leon - can do is breathe. His head feels like an angry hornet nest buzzing with fragments of the last hours while his body feels like the worst case of sore muscles he's ever had, scaled up to ten, alongside his very bones aching like someone stretched them out during his unconsciousness.

"Yeah, I'm getting you out of here."

And wrong. It all feels wrong like when he still had short hair and the hood of his jacket would always lie wrong on the tips. Except it also hurts. Not that sharp, direct pain of getting punched in the stomach, but more the enduring, no less violent feeling of something being deeply and completely wrong, pressing down on nerves that shouldn't be pressured.

"Careful there, don't trip."

Leon could just turn over and fall back asleep. It wouldn't even be hard. Keep his eyes closed and slip back into the black void. There's a part of him insisting that he just curl up and sleep this off until he feels less awful.

"I'm Leon. Nice to meet you, Katherine."

But the fragments slowly form into somewhat more cohesive memories. It's like trying to piece together a puzzle while underwater except the water's also in movement and everything just falls apart the whole damn time and floats away. There's a fragment of getting a call to stay away. A fragment of zombies with wide, torn open mouths lunging at him. A fragment of a room with a heavy wooden table and a drugged, young woman arranged on it like a fucking art installation. And then things get blurry. Flashes of pain, flashes of hunger, flashes of monsters, the world reduced to food, danger, hide.

Leon groans, the sound foreign to his own ears. There's not a whole lot that makes sense, except for the part where he tried to get the young woman - Katherine, she said her name's Katherine, syllables slurring together while she could barely stay on her feet - out of that murder room and then he got attacked from behind. Must have been Katherine's kidnapper, because any zombie would have just eaten Leon and he feels entirely too much like regurgitated roadkill to be dead.

But Katherine could be dead by now, his mind supplies. He obviously failed to get her out in time and while Leon has no idea how long he's been unconscious, he has the feeling it's been a bit. When he tries to think back, he gets some vague flashes of starving, of watching himself break into a pantry like some fucked up version of sleepwalking. Still, he's got to try. Katherine might still be alive. Her captor definitely seemed the type to play with his prey first.

Alright, Kennedy, up you get, he thinks and moves against that lethargic stillness that tells him he should go back to sleep. There's still a chance that Katherine is alive, that he didn't fail her. Now is not the time for a nap. Bracing himself against the weight keeping him down, Leon pushes himself up and freezes mid-motion when something in his back makes a wet, ripping sound. But he can breathe more easily now, even though the sudden cold air hitting his back sends him into shivers.

Even shivering, Leon frees his arms and legs from where they're still stuck and then he takes a moment to just breathe while getting used to the temperature outside the blanket - blanket? Just deep breaths until his vision stops being blurry. He got hit over the head, he remembers. Concussion? Not unlikely.

"OK, that's enough," Leon says, bracing his hands against the - wet, slimy and wet - floor to get up, but aborts the motion when he hears is a series of clicks, chitters and a hiss. Something tells him that what he hears is what he said while his own mind tells him that that cannot be. Those aren't words. He should be hearing words. "What the fuck?" He feels them, those inhuman sounds, in his throat and worse, he can feel his mouth moving all wrong, air reaching all the wrong places-

Where's his tongue? He tries to move his tongue to check what's wrong with his mouth, but instead his mouth itself is moving, parts sliding against one another. Parts!

What- What happened to him while he was knocked out? His hands, he realizes, the hands he's still bracing himself on feel wrong, the way they make contact with the ground is wrong, the way the weight of his body presses on the wrists all wrong. He knows how it should feel like, he's done enough push-ups and planks to know and it doesn't feel like this. Leon takes a deep breath, swallows and forces himself to look, blinking until the blurriness sharpens into something his brain can parse.

Those are not his hands.

Dark, segmented claws - talons? - that are splayed out across the wet and off-white thing covering the floor. They seem to grow directly from... something that is not his arm. His arms aren't- No. Even while those claws start to tremble with the panic Leon feels close up his throat, his mind rejects that that's him. He raises his hand and the claws do exactly that. He wiggles fingers and the claws wiggle instead.

"Don't panic, Kennedy," Leon orders himself and it's a mistake, because those still aren't words, it's all those weird - wrong - noises. Like a bug, an oversized cicada or locust, maybe.

Later. He can panic about all of this later. Whatever happened to him, he's still alive and at the very least he's not a zombie. He's hungry, his stomach a burning emptiness that demands to be filled, but he doesn't seem to crave human brains or meat. The taste of his own blood in his parched throat is more nauseating than appealing. Silver linings. He'd kill for lemonade, though, but first he's got to find Katherine.

Leon gets to his feet - wrong, all wrong - and directly has to hold onto the wall - with hands that are wrong, all wrong, and barely even hands if he's honest - since his balance is off. Way off. Well, he should have a concussion on top of everything else that's going on, so that shouldn't come as a surprise, but it's not that. There's something pressing down onto his shoulders, forcing him into a hunched over posture - and it's wrong how right that feels - and the feet don't touch the ground properly like he's eight again and tip-toeing around the creaking floorboards of his first foster home to get to the fridge and there's something pulling him backwards. There is something pulling at his lower back... that he can feel.

He's pretty sure he's reached his limit for bodily surprises about three surprises ago, but Leon still looks to confirm what he suspects. If he wants to be any effective like this, he's got to know. Past the dark, quivering parts at the lower edge of his field of vision - what that says about his mouth, Leon is refusing to think about - Leon is met with the undeniable existence of a tail. Its covered in the same pale plates of soft - and really tender, like gums healing up after a tooth was pulled - carapace as the arms and when it hits the wall, he feels that. Like someone pressing on a bruise.

There's also something stuck to it, the tail - his tail - twitching to get the additional weight off, but to no avail as it got caught on one of the plates of the carapace. It looks, at best, disgusting. Vaguely wet and slimy and oddly white like the carapace, mixed with something blue.

His carapace, Leon forces himself to acknowledge the facts that have undeniably and quite literally grown on him. Not the carapace, his. Not the tail, his. The arms, the claws, those are his arms and his claws. And whatever's going on with his mouth, well, that's his mouth now.

He'll just postpone finding out what exactly it is.

Carefully Leon pulls at the stuck thing, trying not to poke himself with his too long and too few clawed fingers - those are his jeans. The white stuff is more of what's covering the ground and the wet slime is what he realizes is still covering him, making his carapace shimmer. The white stuff is carapace, too, isn't it?

That's a moult. He moulted.

"I need a shower," Leon, trying to focus on practical aspects rather than literally anything else, chitters - he fucking chitters - at his pair of jeans which, frankly, could use a shower too. Or the incinerator of a waste plant. Same goes for his shirts that lie torn to pieces among shed carapace and skin.

His gaze catches on an impressive number of empty jam glasses, all labelled in the same scrawl with what seems to be the date and ingredients, all with the lids cut off, that frame the whole mess of Leon's moult. Leon blinks at the realization that some of that sleepwalking might have been more real than he'd like.

Leon drops his jeans. They're beyond saving just like him and Katherine has to be his first priority. Everything else - figuring out how to shower and put on clothes in his current state... while in a city infested with zombies, he should not forget about that part, as well as freaking out about whatever it is that happened to him - all that can come later.

Finding his way back to the orphanage with a soggy city guide in the rain had been a challenge, but Leon manages it eventually. The only upside to the rain - disgustingly cold and running into every opening in his carapace - is that he now feels clean again. Wet, cold, but no longer like he climbed out of his moulted skin. The rain had also been useful to clean off the blood and brain matter that Leon got onto his claws when he inevitably ran into zombies. Apparently being an oversized bug monster did not stop zombies from seeing him as food.

Leon picks up the first blanket he finds inside, immediately poking three holes into it, and carefully towels himself dry. He has no clue whether oversized - his head still smarts where he hit the doorframe - bug monsters can get a cold and he has no desire to find out. Aside from that, he dislikes being cold and wet more than letting anything touch his still relatively soft and tender carapace. He really hopes that hardens more. It would make for the world's most fucked up riot gear, but Leon's got to admit that that at least would be useful in his current situation.

That is as far as he can distract himself from the glaring utter mess he's faced with. Katherine isn't here and neither is her body. However, there is a body and it belongs to his should-have-been boss. Chief of police Brian Irons has been stabbed thoroughly and repeatedly in various parts of his body, including at least once through his dick, with scalpels and scissors and a few implements that don't seem suited to stabbing. It's not hard to read what this spells out, even though Leon hates to do so. By all accounts, it looks like Irons was the one who kidnapped and drugged Katherine and therefore also the one who hit Leon over the head and is responsible for Leon's current state - unless he just won the big prize in apocalypse roulette while everyone else turned into zombies. Leon's involvement must have been enough for the drugs to wear off far enough for Katherine to defend herself and then stab Irons to escape this place.

Leon slumps down in the murder cellar. Katherine's captor, meaning Chief Irons apparently, had been his one clue into finding out what the hell happened to turn him into this. He can't blame her, though. In Katherine's position - what he assumed had been her position in all of this - he wouldn't have acted any different.

Still, it sucks for him.

"Fuck," Leon says, a trill ending on a click. Fuck, he swears again and again as his eyes grow suspiciously wet. He's some kind of bug, the one person he hoped to have answers is dead, he's got no idea what he's doing or where to go from here and his almost-boss was a murderer and, given where Katherine stabbed him, also a rapist. He's not sure why it's that, not the zombies, the bug-things, the moulting, that make him feel like the rug's been pulled out from under him, but that his almost-boss seemed to have been a truly rotten person does.

It takes Leon longer than he cares to admit to get himself under control again. Irons is dead - and surprisingly doesn't seem to want to get up unlike all the other dead outside - he can't change that, but that doesn't mean that all hope's gone. Irons could have left behind a diary or notes of some kind that include any information, any starting point for Leon to figure out what happened to him.

Searching the orphanage means going through every room, trying to manoeuvre himself and his tail through an abandoned nursery - everything here is abandoned and after finding some diaries written by children who lived here for a time, Leon can piece together why - with varying success. There is more than one stuffed toy he sends flying as the uncooperative limb slams into them. His tail seems to want to work as balance, but for the most part it just hits everything in a six foot radius around Leon. Walls, shelves, stuffed toys, zombies, doesn't matter. He's got to have bruises beneath his carapace by now and bruises beneath those bruises.

Every room means that Leon eventually finds the bathroom and its the first one he hesitates to enter. Bathrooms mean mirrors. He's seen a bit of himself by now in reflections on broken windows and water puddles, the white carapace, the red, fleshy parts between the plates, the tail... but none of those gave a clear reflection, just enough to guess. And, well, Leon doesn't have the most vivid imagination, but he doesn't need to to know that he looks like something straight out of a nightmare.

Leon postpones that decision until later.

Further searching finally produces something helpful - a letter to the director. Special mutation, he reads. Ability to regenerate. Our laboratory. Put together it reads like a place out of comics and coincidentally also like his likeliest lead. That's a clue he can follow, Leon thinks, and spares an annoyed glance at his tail that for some reason is thumping against the floor. His situation definitely falls under special mutation or nothing does and if someone made this, him, then there's got to be a way to... turn him back? It's a thought that hadn't crossed his mind so far, but now that the immediate panic and the first wave of anger has subsided, he's starting to plan for what comes next like leaving this zombie-infested city. But the way he is now, that's hardly an option. Oversized bug monsters don't fit with everyday life.

So, the next step is to find a laboratory producing monsters in a city belonging to a pharmaceutical corporation while said city is being roamed by flesh- and bug-eating zombies. Shouldn't be too hard, he thinks cynically.

Well, no, the next step is to find some clothes. Katherine seems to have escaped fine on her own and he's mostly dry again by now and, frankly, just wants to feel a bit normal in this whole mess that he's in. Leon's head turns in the direction of the bathroom once more. A bathroom could have clothes. And... he should probably know what he looks like before he ends up attacking his own reflection like that trash movie dragon with the painfully bad pyro effects he watched a few years ago. His last foster family had been happy to just throw money for a ticket to the cinema at him and have him out of their hair the rest of the day, never once questioning how Leon would watch three movies for the price of one ticket. That dragon movie had not been worth the price of the popcorn he ate to sit through it.

Which leads him back to the bathroom and its mirror. Swallowing, Leon enters and immediately sees clothes hung up at the side that could be big enough for him. He has no idea yet how to put them on or what to do about his tail, but he'll get there. Even torn clothes that likely belong to his dead almost-boss are an upgrade over being functionally naked in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

He also finds a mirror, a simple, reflective rectangle with a cracked corner that has twins in every motel between here and the Rockies.

What looks back at Leon is not him. The hair, that's still the same. Still damp from the rain and in urgent need of a brush after towelling it dry, but combing it roughly with his claws is the best he can do right now. Everything from the forehead down is foreign to him. It's barely even recognizable as having been human before. Its eyes, while still blue, glow and lack any other human characteristic like pupils or eyelashes. Eyebrows, as a matter of fact, are also nowhere to be found... neither is a nose. Leon can still smell, but now he wonders how, and the inhuman face in the mirror frowns in tandem with him. Below that even the traces of humanity vanish. A jaw that splits into a number of parts, a far too thick neck protected by overlapping plates of a carapace. Shoulders, chest, the same, which is where the mirror thankfully, mercifully cuts off.

None of it is human.

All of it is Leon.

----------

So. yeah. Leon's having a rough time before he meets Sherry. [thinks on what comes next] yeah, a pretty rough time.

Hrm, so, ramblings? I know I already talked a bit about how plaga metamorphosis went for Leon in this and since I don't remember what went into the ramblings of the sherry snippet and what went into replies... ah, well, let's not repeat myself. There's stuff, the caterpillar (for lack of a better word) stadium that Leon experienced as distant and like sleepwalking kind of was more the plaga in control than Leon just to get its host through this madness and after that it's mostly Leon. The plaga's pretty quiet for now and hella exhausted. Poor thing^^

Leon's currently running around with an incompletely sclerotized/hardened carapace, with the hardened parts pretty much limited to the most necessary and the rest is more leathery (so tough but pliable) once it dries rather than hard. I'm also pretty sure that he's anemic as fuck since that's a whole extra limb and a good bit of extra size that needs to be supplied with blood and hemoglobin (i mean, the parts between the carapace are red, kinda implies there's hemoglobin involved) while running on the iron of a fit, 21yo guy. The concussion, funnily enough, was high up on the plaga list of things to take care of, so the head wound got healed^^ he's just out of it due to [waves hand] everything.

Oh, and of course Katherine Warren had to stab Irons. I don't know, I think the girl deserves a bit of self defence as a treat and to survive Raccoon City. No worries, we'll see her again. (this makes her one of two people among the raccoon city survivors who has seen Leon before the plaga got to work, the other one being Sherry who saw Irons deposit his body in the rpd)

“Rookie, good to see you,” Marvin greets, taking his hand off his pistol. Of course, it would be better if the rookie had never come here at all, if he had just listened when he was told to stay away, but what’s done is done. Leon’s here now, and Marvin will allow himself to be happy to see the young man alive and intact.

Except… Marvin’s eyes narrow as he sees Leon stumble, hands clutching his sides. And then, Leon falls. 

“Leon!” Marvin rushes over to the rookie, ignoring the pain shooting up his leg as he kneels beside the young man. Leon groans as Marvin touches his shoulder, folding over himself. Marvin scans Leon’s uniform, looking for any bite marks or other injuries, but there’s nothing visible. His sleeves are stained with the half-coagulated blood of the zombies, but none of the blood is fresh enough to be Leon’s.

“Talk to me, rookie,” Marvin orders, even as he pries at Leon’s arms, trying to see if there’s an injury beneath. “What’s wrong?”

“‘urts,” Leon mutters through gritted teeth. “Everythin’ on fire.” The young man’s breathing is sharp and shallow, just this side of hyperventilating. He groans, bending over himself, nearly pressing his forehead to the floor. Still, the boy has enough wherewithal to answer the question Marvin’s really after. “No bites. Checked.”

Marvin hums. Carefully, he helps Leon up, guiding the young man to one of the lobby’s couches. Leon obeys without complaint, collapsing onto the bench as soon as Marvin starts to ease him down. While Leon grits his teeth, so hard Marvin can hear them grinding together, the Lieutenant strips Leon of his bullet-proof vest for a more thorough examination.

But even on a second look, Marvin can’t find any bites, not even a scratch, to explain Leon’s condition. But there’s clearly something wrong, Leon’s forehead is beaded with sweat, muscles locked so tight it’s a wonder he can even breathe.

“What can you tell me, kid?” Marvin asks, desperate for some way he can help, but first he needs to know what the hell is wrong. (Aside from the zombie apocalypse happening outside.)

Leon shakes his head silently. “Stomach ‘urts,” he mutters, arms clamped around his midsection. He barks a quiet, pained laugh. “Course I get the flu at a time like this. Fuck.”

Marvin presses his fingers to Leon’s forehead, frowning. The rookie is abnormally warm, and his skin feels far too dry, almost papery. Marvin has to pull his hand back as Leon starts coughing, body shaking from the force of it. And then, Leon gags, and Marvin jerks back as blood splatters over the kid’s hand.

The coughs turn wet, but even with Leon’s blood staining the tile, they don’t stop. Marvin can do little more than brace Leon’s shoulders as the boy continues to wheeze, red spilling over his lips. Finally the coughing fit subsides, wet choking turning to soft gasps. Marvin rubs the rookie’s back, swallowing back the pervasive feeling of useless that’s hung over him for the past week.

Without warning, Leon pitches forward. Marvin just barely catches the kid before he gets a face full of tile. Slowly, Marvin eases Leon into a sitting position on the ground, and then nudges the rookie to lie on his side. Leon obeys, chest rattling with wheezy breaths.

“Wha’s happenin’ to me?” Leon gasps as he folds into the fetal position, knees drawn to his chest.

Marvin doesn’t know. Something is wrong. None of the people who currently stalk the halls had shown symptoms like this… whatever it is, it’s something else. And Marvin’s just as powerless to help Leon as he was for the civilians who’d come to the station seeking refuge. 

Leon lets out a whimper, curling so tight Marvin swears he can hear the kid’s bones creaking. Except… he can hear creaking. 

Frowning, Marvin leans closer to Leon, and fuck, it is the kid. Beneath Leon’s groans of pain, Marvin can hear muffled cracks and pops, like those of fractured bone and popping joints. Instantly, Marvin’s alarm climbs. Is this because of how tightly wound Leon’s is?! Fuck, is it possible to break your own bone just by muscle tension?! Marvin’s no doctor, but he can’t rule it out.

“Leon,” Marvin says, grabbing the rookie’s shoulder, shaking him. “Leon, you have to relax!”

The rookie’s only answer is a keening noise and compressing himself further. Marvin’s grip tightens on the rookie’s shoulder and… he pauses. The hell? The kid’s shirt looks… tighter than it did a second ago, fabric stretched thin over his chest. Fuck, he’s seeing things.

Marvin shifts his gaze to Leon’s head. He brushes the hair from Leon’s face, pressing his fingers to the kid’s pulse point. The muscles in the rookie’s neck are so taut the entire expanse of skin is rigid. Marvin can barely feel a pulse beneath his fingers. Marvin glances at Leon’s face, screwed up in utter agony. 

“Come on, rookie,” Marvin pleads, as if Leon can do anymore to stop this than he can. As Marvin watches, the skin of Leon’s face and neck discolors, like a rapidly forming bruise. It’s alarming, but even more so is that something is moving under the skin of Leon’s cheek.

It could easily be Leon running his tongue along the inside of his mouth. Except Leon’s jaw is clenched so tightly shut Marvin’s half sure he’s cracked a tooth.

As Marvin watches in horror, the thing continues to writhe, pushing outward, until it finally stretches the skin too far. The skin of Leon’s cheek tears away, revealing exposed teeth and red gums, twitching protrusions flaring out from Leon’s skull, covered in remnants of skin. 

Marvin swears as the wriggling things are bared to the air, scrambling back. He watches, terrified, as the rip in Leon’s skin grows, running past the kid’s jaw and down his neck. As the skin splits it starts to peel away, revealing something darker beneath. Something that isn’t skin. And it’s then that Leon starts to scream.

The kid’s head snaps back and he lets out a bloodcurdling screech of pure agony. As he does, Marvin gets a front row seat to how his lower jaw splits in two, unfurling alongside the new appendages into a bloom of red flesh and sharpened teeth. Marvin shoves himself back as Leon starts writhing on the ground, arms wrapped around his body like it can contain whatever horror is fighting to tear itself free.

But as Marvin has learned so vividly the past week, the horrors do not often sit quietly.

Leon’s legs kick out as if to save him from his invisible attacker. The boots split along their seams and something that is anything but human unfurls. Talons, honest to god talons, like those given to dinosaurs, are suddenly clawing at the air, at the ground. They rake over the back of Leon’s calves, shredding fabric and ripping away skin to expose the same slick brown that coats Leon’s neck. The same brown that coats his arms beneath peeling ragged skin.

Oh God, oh God…

Beneath the screams and Marvin’s own thundering heartbeat, he can hear the sound of fabric ripping, seams snapping. And then, without warning, there is suddenly a third limb flailing through the air alongside Leon’s legs, pulled from his spine. A tail. A fucking goddamned tail. With every convulsion the tail seems to get longer and longer. It lashes wildly in response to its owner’s pain, scattering chairs and old privacy screens dividers in a cacophony of crashing metal. It is heavy and deadly and just the impact could kill him, regardless of intention.

Marvin scrambles back further until he can go no further, pressed flush against a wall as he stares and stares and stares— 

After what seems like an eternity, the thrashing slows, then stops. Leon, or whatever he is now, finally stills, slumping motionless on the tile floor of the R.P.D. The ground is stained with blood and torn scraps of flesh, Leon’s skin, litter the ground like confetti.

No no what the fuck no what the hell oh god— Marvin’s mind is a mass of static and white noise, no true thought except all-encompasing horror that is steeped into every neuron. That, and a lingering thought, a candle flame he hadn’t realized had still been lit, snuffed out in a spray of blood. (A spray of blood as he shot Brad in the throat, mouth gaped open in gurgling apology.)

Not Leon too—

Marvin slowly continues to retreat, eyes locked on Leon as he begins to shift and move. The rookie—or what was his rookie—pants, open mouthed, the appendages on his face flaring. Leon’s back arches, flexing pointed overlapping plates that have torn through his shirt. They rattle, stretching up and tearing a few more seams with each panting breath. The tail that now stretches behind him scrapes against the tile, long and serpentine, tipped with a wicked-looking stinger like a scorpion from hell.

As Leon continues to pant, he shakes his head, the hair that still adorns the top of his head falling over his face. Slowly, the once-young-man sits up, on his hands and knees, raising his head. And Marvin can only freeze as Leon lays eyes on him. 

The eyes are still blue.

Marvin murmurs a silent prayer, to a God he no longer thinks exists, the weight of his pistol heavy at his side. If whatever Leon is now wants him dead, there isn’t much Marvin can do to stop him. And at this point, with Leon gone too… Marvin would let him.

The lieutenant barely breathes as Leon watches him, eyes squinted. Slowly, Leon raises a hand, rubbing at his eyes. And then he pauses, hand hovering in front of him for a split second before he throws himself backward. Marvin belatedly flinches at the rapid movement, and then again from the loud clatter as Leon’s back slams into the low wall behind him.

The rookie’s chest is heaving, straining the blue uniform that still clings to his expanded torso. He scrabbles at the wall behind him, taloned legs kicking out again, batting his nearby tail away. Marvin can see Leon wince at the impact before he abruptly goes still again, only broken by the occasional twitch of his arms and legs.

Marvin’s blood is pounding in his ears. The floor is cold and hard beneath him.

The air reeks of iron, but then, it’s smelled like that for days now. 

Then, slowly, the legs unfurl. Leon shifts, tail slithering across the floor. The rookie’s hands—one clawed and armored, the other still resembling the human he was—are brought in front of him. Marvin watches. He watches as Leon blinks downs at his hands, as he flexes them. He watches as Leon’s breathing accelerates, tail-tip rattling against the tile. He watches as Leon brings mismatched hands to his face, feeling over exposed teeth and gums and twitching appendages. 

Marvin watches. And he sees Leon’s eyes widen as he realizes the state of his body. He sees something undeniably panicked, in wide eyes and rapid breaths. Something undeniably human.

Oh god, he’s still lucid—

“Leon…?”

Marvin’s voice comes out as barely a whisper, but it’s all it takes for Leon’s gaze to snap to him. The rookie’s eyes blow wider, pupils mere pinpricks, and he jerks away from Marvin. Marvin can’t truly read Leon’s expression, the entire lower half of his face gone and in pieces on the floor, but the eyes say it well enough. 

The rookie is terrified.

(Marvin is too.)

Leon scoots further back from Marvin—and at any other time, in any other situation, in any other place, he might have found it comical to see such a giant insect-like creature skittering away from a measly human. The rookie is shaking, his entire body trembling in fear as he stares at Marvin. As if Marvin is the one with claws and fangs. Except… no, Marvin realizes, as Leon’s shaking hand lowers toward the holster still clinging to his leg, Leon’s not scared of Marvin.

Leon’s scared for Marvin.

Scared of himself.

“Leon–!” Marvin exclaims as his voice cracks. He raises his hands, trying to get the kid to put the gun down, look at me. But he doesn’t get to say any of that, before there’s a loud crash from elsewhere in the atrium and a chorus of wet guttural groans. 

Marvin snaps his eyes from Leon toward the sound, heart climbing in his throat. Fuck, they’ve broken through! He pushes himself to his feet, cursing the pain in his knee, until his eyes alight on the corpses that are staggering out from under a gap in one of shutters. Shit, shit, they must have been drawn by Leon’s screams. Marvin’s hand hovers over his pistol, eyeing the zombies. Fuck. He doesn’t have that many bullets.

Before Marvin can think further, he’s scooped him off the ground. He yelps, flailing for a half second as he’s cradled to a blue-shirted chest and suddenly he’s moving. Marvin looks up, stomach in his throat, only to blink as he looks up at Leon. The rookie holds him close, the atrium blurring past as he sprints and jumps to the second floor balcony. Then the kid is shoving open the door to the second floor waiting room with his shoulder and bundling both of them inside before he slams it shut.

The arms that held Marvin suddenly relax their grip. The lieutenant slips free, staggering slightly as he bears his own weight again. Marvin glances back at Leon, who has slid to the ground, back resting against the door. The rookie’s eyes are distant, shining with unshed tears.

Marvin moves closer, carefully resting his hand on Leon’s shoulder. It’s the… new one. Instead of skin, what’s beneath his hand is something more akin to crab shell. It’s hard and rigid, and oddly smooth, though as Marvin runs his fingers over it, he can feel small bumps and a roughness akin to the bristles of chin hairs he missed shaving.

Eventually, Leon turns his head to look at Marvin. His eyes, all three, stare at Marvin, blue and overflowing with tears. The kid sniffles, the appendages on his face—mandibles, perhaps, considering the similarity to an arthropod—flaring away from his face. 

“Marvin?” the kid whispers, barely audible, but the man hears it.

“I’m here, rookie,” Marvin says, his other hand reaching up to Leon’s unarmored bicep. Beneath his hand, Leon’s arm feels simultaneously too big and much too thin for its size. Marvin rubs circles into the skin. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Leon chokes, the dam finally breaking as he lets out a harsh, guttural sob. Tears spill down his cheeks and over his exposed gums. The tail, Leon’s tail, wraps around him, which just makes Leon sob harder. Marvin leans into the kid, wrapping his arms around the too-large chest and hugging him as best he can.

(Despite Leon’s new size, he feels too thin, too lanky. There’s a pallor to his skin, a softness to his carapace, that Marvin can’t help but worry about. He’s far too big, he weighs too little.)

The rookie’s body shakes with the force of his sobs while Marvin quietly holds him. It’s a nameless grief, a fear they both know too well. One made manifest and all the more potent by the people turned mindless monsters that stalk the station’s halls.