GRAVEDIGGER ━━━ leon s. kennedy

two.

Portable white curtains obscured the view to Leon and gave the father-daughter duo some privacy in the middle of the spacious main hall of the station as he geared up. Vera was slumped on a crate, elbows on knees, and hands shaking around the empty bottle of berry juice; all of her energy was going into regulating her emotions so she wouldn't have a meltdown. Marvin was breathing raggedly at the corner of her vision but she couldn't bear to look at him, physically couldn't bring herself to take one look, afraid that if she saw the deterioration, it'd somehow become the trigger of reality on Marvin's temple to take him away the moment she acknowledged it.

The ashy undertone of his once healthy brown skin flashed right before her eyes every time she closed them — the blood staining his uniform brighter than ruby, it wouldn't leave her, stained the back of her mind, sticky red soot. "How did this happen — no, when did this happen, since when?"

The air hung heavy, bearing the answer spelled out in the silence.

Her bones trembled under how he might have been trying to hide it as they were talking over the radio acting fine and dandy. How bizarre it was that Vera went to explode his ear off from complaining even when she got the smallest scratches, and her father hid away as long as he could until it'd take one strong sneeze to knock him out. She didn't want to think about what he was planning to do disappearing off in that condition, she didn't want to think about the exhausted acceptance of death in his face — didn't want to think about how Marvin had already left her behind in his mind.

Instead, she listened to him saying, "It doesn't matter, Vera. None of that matters," — foreign, small, shaky. A Marvin who was a stranger to her.

A Marvin who was the personification of her worst nightmares.

Vera's eyes burned at the sheer amount of effort he put in to talk normally without letting his pain show. "It fucking does!"

Marvin scowled. "Now you know better than to use that language around me—"

He was bleeding out, how was this relevant?

"I don't care!" Vera threw away the plastic as far away as she could, standing up in nervous energy her body couldn't get rid of, it was a bomb clashing against the silence that came after. "What is that wound? What the fuck is it? Did they claw on you, were you—"

"Vera," Marvin leaned back, calm, strained, eyes closed. "Enough."

No, it couldn't be.

That had to be a simple gash, he was simply distasteful at her implying he was bitten. Of course. "Then let me tend to this, why haven't you put anything on it yet?"

The question itself was a dare to the worst possible response ever, it dared to be asked so the answer would be different from what it wanted confirmed.

No word of how Marvin was missing the whole time between the arrival of UBCS soldiers and Leon — and why exactly he was gone. Vera would ignore it for the sake of changing the reason altogether, if she could fix him from here on out, it didn't matter, not right now.

"I can't waste these resources on me."

Spoken like a person who knew the date of his death.

Vera recoiled back, "What?"

The word left the trembling lips of a child, holding tightly to the leg of a parent who had his back turned, half gone in spirit, half ready to leave with a suitcase in hand, sand slipping away from her fingers.

He couldn't leave her. He couldn't go like this.

She crouched in front of him, trying to catch his eyes and clutching to Marvin's hands like a madman, not even a thought spared to how his hands were fucking icy and sticky from blood. "There is nobody else. It's just me, you, and Leon over there. I don't know where David is. This is all we have left. How can you say it would be a waste? How can you ever—" She had to swallow to not choke up, shaking her head. "You're losing so much blood, just— have you gone stupid from it?"