@polarspaz more bug crossover! The art of old man bug had me inspired on what an interaction with his younger selves would be like, and I wrote this! (I plan on more, including the perspective of the younger Leon's and Old Man getting to hug Ashley + Luis, but just this for now)
...
Leon hummed lightly as he stretched his limbs out a bit further, trying to catch every square centimeter of sunlight he could. The heat soaked into his carapace and muscles, a balm for the seemingly ever present ache in his joints. Leon churred in contentment, a sound echoed by Rucio. A sharp beep jolted him awake sometime later, and Leon cracked an eye open, glancing at his watch as he quieted the alarm.
“Hm, time to go,” Leon muttered, pushing himself to his feet. His carapace scraped against the rock as he stood from his sunbathing spot. Right, time to get back home before the kids started thinking he’d forgotten their visit. Leon chuckled. “I may be over a century, but I’m not losing my memory quite yet.’
He set off back toward his house, content to enjoy the sun and the rest of his walk. He’d probably go for a run later, but at the moment he wasn’t in any rush. Closing his eyes, Leon tipped his head back to the sky, trusting Rucio to tell him if he was about to fall off a cliff. Still, it was a bit of a surprise when Rucio shrieked with alarm and Leon felt the ground sweep out from under him.
Instinct took over and Leon turned his fall into a roll as he hit the ground. As he came back to his feet, eyes already sweeping his surroundings, Leon noted three very important things. First, the temperature had dropped sharply by a solid 40F, heat no longer pressing in on him from every direction. Second, Leon was not in the Arizona desert.
No, instead this looked a hell of a lot like the classified Alaskan military base he’d left behind several decades ago when he turned 100 and the cold became too much for his ailing joints.
Third, and most bizarrely, was that across the green Leon could see himself, or at least, a him that looked about 80 years younger. And next to that was… an even tinier version of Leon, except one far lighter in color and lacking far more spikes than Leon had ever had. Both of them were staring at him, mouths agape.
You seeing this too, Rucio? Leon asked, and got a quiet affirmative ping from his partner. Shit… what do you think the chances are of this being a very vivid out of body experience?
Rucio didn’t deign to answer that.
Leon inhaled, the unmistakable scent of Alaskan summer—of spruce and birch and pollen—filling his lungs. It didn’t feel like a dream… Leon had certainly never smelled during a dream before. But unless he’d missed something, teleportation wasn’t a thing yet. Neither was time travel. (But he was feeling an odd sense of deja vu… like a half remembered dream.)
Think we could just sprint into the woods and ignore all this? Leon wondered, but Rucio gave him the mental equivalent of a shove. Interesting, interesting, the plaga murmured in not-quite-words. Go see.
Leon sighed, but obliged, wandering closer to his younger doppelganger and the… prepubescent version. As he got closer, he noted this dream really was quite detailed. It was like looking in a mirror, only Leon was 40 instead of 120. But that still didn’t explain the baby. The features were so round. Where Leon had proper spikes on his carapace, were rounded nubs on the baby, carapace so lightly colored it could nearly pass for Leon’s original skin tone.
Leon stopped when he was within about twenty feet. His weirdly young counterparts stare at him in turn, eyes wide in pure shock. Leon knows the feeling.
“Oh my god, it’s another one,” his younger version muttered. Which… okay?
The baby slapped Leon’s younger self in the arm, never breaking eye contact with Leon himself. “It’s me, er, us,” the baby whispered, eyes practically sparkling. Leon blinked. Us? “Us but old.” There was a pause, then the baby’s mandibles hugged his face in a picture of pure embarrassment that Leon had never seen outside of himself. “Ack, sorry I uh…”
Leon couldn’t help it, he snorted. God, this one was just like the rookies he’d met over the years. “Don’t be, I’ve been called worse. Besides, you’re not wrong. I am old.”
Leon was over a hundred after all. But no, he did not remember the dinosaurs, Len. You know very well when those were around and Leon may be old but he’s not prehistoric. (Well… Rucio was. Kind of. Technically.)
“Anyways,” Leon flicked his tail dismissively. “I may be old but I’m pretty sure I’ve got some time before I get to the stage of hallucinating. So tell me, what is… all this?”
His younger self exhaled. “The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future walk into an old Alaskan base, all with the name of Leon Kennedy. Lemme know when you figure out the punchline.”
Leon blinked. Once. Twice. Thrice.
Ghost of Christmas Future.
“Time travel,” he echoed, and pinched the bridge of his nonexistent nose. “You’re fucking with me…” Leon sighed, glancing around at what he could see of the base. It did look… oddly new. The buildings were newly refurbished, the spruce forest on the south side of the training grounds still intact, before that wildfire in late 2010 had burned close to base.
… Time travel.
He was in the past.
He… he might be able to see them again. Luis, Ashley, Chris, Claire, Jill… everyone. Even if it was only a minute… Here and now, they were alive. Leon swallowed, blinking back the heat building behind his eyes. Right… the kids would probably forgive him for being late. Just this once.
“Right,” Leon shook off his melancholy, gesturing to his two(?) doppelgangers. “Okay, so you’re… me?” The younger him made sense, but Leon was confident that even during his earliest period of mutation, he hadn’t looked like a baby.
His younger self—who looked like when Leon had been in his thirties—nodded. “I’m from around 2010. Rookie here,” he pointed a thumb at the baby, “is from ‘02. He got turned in Raccoon City, I got turned in Spain.”
Leon blinked. Spain made sense. “Raccoon City?” he echoed, glancing at ‘Rookie.’ “How the fuck did that happen?”
‘Rookie’ shrugged. “It just did. We figure I’m from a… parallel timeline to Vet here. In mine, Irons infected me when I visited Raccoon a week prior to the outbreak itself.”
So not only was time travel a thing, so were parallel dimensions. The kids were going to love this. In addition to the fact Leon was meeting himself when he was 33, and an infected version of himself at 25. Because even in old age, his life continued to defy expectation.
“So, sounds like you were infected in Spain too?” ‘Vet’ asked, eyeing Leon with something he recognized as uncertainty.
Leon nodded. “Yep, in 2004.”
“Aw, damn,” Rookie gave a disappointed huff, but quickly shook it off, staring at Leon curiously. “So, how old are you?” he asked. Rookie’s eyes trailed over Leon, catching on the spikes that trailed down his tail and the small scratches littering his carapace.
Leon shrugged. “Guess.”
Rookie squinted at him, eyes lingering on Leon’s hair that was equal parts brown and grey. (The kids still told him his hair was more brown than grey, but Leon wasn’t convinced.) “…Fifty? Sixty?” the kid guessed.
Leon hummed, neither rejecting nor confirming. But judging by the widening eyes on both his counterparts, they took it as a confirmation. Leon let them. Because how was he supposed to tell them he was twice the age they thought he was? How was he supposed to explain that, while they didn’t know it now, the mutation had slowed their aging? That Leon had outlived all his friends and family? Leon knew himself. It would not go well.
“You’re fucking with me,” his less-young-self—hell, what was he supposed to call that one, midlife crisis? What did Rookie call him… Vet?—gaped at him. “You’re sixty? We make it to sixty?” Sixty and beyond, Leon doesn’t say, but he nods all the same. He understands the shock. At that age, Leon didn’t think he’d make it to thirty, let alone sixty.
“So,” Leon glanced around at the base that had been his home for decades. It’s… odd to be back here. He missed it. This was, after all, where he’d lived with Luis. “Do I need to start learning quantum mechanics? Because as fun as this is, I don’t think they’re equipped for three of us, and I refuse to be here during winter.”
(Alaskan summers were warm, but it did not make up for the winter cold. He preferred the Arizona desert, thank you very much.)
His counterparts laugh, and Leon finds his mandibles twitching up in a smile.
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