[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 415 - Rebekah Wants to Experience It Firsthand

Leon felt like his brain had just been blenderized.

Three people?

Was this an Electra complex?

Another daddy?

Fuck.

What the hell. These people's heads weren't wired anywhere close to normal.

After Beth said it, it was like every last drop of strength drained out of her at once.

She hugged her guitar and slumped against the guard post railing, face a total wreck from crying, looking wretched and small.

But the strange thing was, she also looked like she'd just exhaled for the first time in months.

Those dirty, shameful secrets that had been sitting on her chest, stealing her sleep every single night — she'd finally let them out.

And now that she had... the sky hadn't actually fallen?

She lifted her head and looked at Leon.

The panic and evasiveness from before were gone. What replaced them was something else entirely — the flat, open calm of someone who'd already broken the jar and stopped worrying about the pieces.

"You... are you going to tell Maggie?"

Her voice came out thick with snot and tears. She sounded miserable.

Tell Maggie?

Tell her that her little sister, the one who looked as pure as a goddamn angel — had not only spied on their threesome but somehow developed a full-blown Electra complex in the process?

Leon had zero doubt how that played out. Maggie would pick up Hershel Greene's heirloom hunting rifle, shoot Beth's legs out from under her, and then come for him next.

"No." He ground the word out through his teeth.

Right now, he just needed to get out of here.

The moment she heard it, something lit up in Beth's eyes.

She hopped off the railing and walked straight up to him.

"So... can we go back to how things were?"

She tilted her tear-streaked face up at him, asking with all the careful hopefulness of someone defusing a bomb.

Leon felt his temples start to throb.

Go back to how things were?

Every time he looked at her now, his brain auto-played another daddy on a loop.

How exactly were things supposed to go back?

"As long as... as long as you don't tell anyone,"

Beth's voice dropped lower and lower. An unnatural flush crept across her cheeks.

"In private... I... I could call you that..."

"If you like hearing it, I can!"

Leon shook her hand off and basically ran.

One more second in there and either he was losing his mind or she already had.

Beth watched his retreating figure, that stumbling, barely-keeping-it-together exit, and went still for a moment.

Then the corner of her mouth curved up into a sly, satisfied smile.

...

Leon walked fast the whole way back. He needed to talk to someone, urgently.

No. Not talk.

He needed someone who actually knew things. Someone who could diagnose him.

Because it felt like his brain had been quietly infected with malware. The kind that read other people's private thoughts without permission and absolutely could not be uninstalled.

Without thinking, he turned toward the two geniuses in the prison.

Candice. And Rebekah.

His feet changed direction toward the hospital wing.

He kept his head down the whole way, deliberately avoiding everyone's eyes.

Looking at anyone right now made him feel guilty.

He was terrified someone else might decide to say something they shouldn't.

When Leon pushed open the lab door, Rebekah was bent over a beaker with safety goggles on, completely locked in on the white smoke curling up from inside it.

Black powder sat at the bottom of the beaker.

Eugene's half-finished gunpowder. The useless idiot's contribution to the cause.

"The particle size is wrong,"

Rebekah said, not looking up. She stirred the powder with a glass rod, brow tight.

"And the saltpeter purity is terrible. Way too many impurities."

"The odds of firing a bullet loaded with this stuff safely are worse than winning the lottery."

She kept muttering, completely oblivious to the fact that Leon had walked in.

"Rebekah."

Her hand stopped.

She looked up, took one look at Leon's face, dark enough to wring water from, and blinked.

"What happened? You look like you just swallowed a fly. A live one."

Leon was not in the mood.

He dragged a chair over, sat down across from her, and asked, in complete seriousness, a question that made absolutely no sense to her.

"Have you ever heard of... an ability that makes people tell the truth?"

Rebekah pulled off her goggles. Those clear eyes of hers filled with confusion.

"An ability to tell the truth? You mean... hypnosis?"

"No." Leon shook his head. "More... direct than that."

He hesitated. Then he decided to come clean.

He left out the more explosive details, obviously.

He just told her that he seemed to be able, when he looked at someone, to make them say what was actually on their mind. No control over it. It just came out.

He told her about Lizzie, the little girl who was absolutely convinced that walkers were just "a different kind of person."

He told her about Daryl, the iron-hard tough guy quietly being eaten alive by an Oedipus complex.

And he told her about a girl who, because of what she'd seen while spying, had developed thoughts about him that had no business existing.

As he talked, the expression on Rebekah's face moved through stages. Confusion first. Then, slowly, shock.

"Hey, Leon," she said. "Could you use that ability on me?"

"I want to experience it myself before I say anything."

➤ Next: Getting Ready to Develop It a Bit