Confrontation

Holly looked puzzled when the door opened and her son stood where she expected her daughter to be. That puzzlement morphed into fear when Leon grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her against the hallway wall, his normally docile face pulled back into a snarl.

“You KNEW! She suffered in silence for years and you fucking KNEW!!” Leon spat the words at her.

It didn’t take long for Holly to understand what he was talking about.

“She- Jessica told you...? Okay... okay. Listen honey. Your father-“

“Is a sick fuck! If you start making excuses for him I swear to god I’ll throw you down the fucking stairs!” he threatened. Between the hatred in him on Jessie’s behalf, and the despairing frustration of losing her, Leon was barely in control of himself.

Just like with Lily. The thought did nothing to quell his rage.

“I’d never! But you don’t understand. All this time I’ve been trying to save up money to get the three of us out of here. You, Me, and Jessie. When he went after Jessie... you’ve got to understand that he was all I had-”

Leon regarded her coldly and placed a hand against her throat, right against her windpipe. It rested there without pressure physical pressure, but it put immense mental pressure on both of them. “All you had? You had us, Mom! You had your kids. He molests your eight year old little girl, our little Jessie girl with her Goosebumps books and her awkwardness, and then she comes to you with all that confusion, hurt, betrayal... with the fear of losing someone she totally trusted, and then she finds out that BOTH of her protectors are pieces of shit. Who could blame her for having trust issues? Thank god she didn’t fucking kill herself, Mom! You’re just as much of a monster as he is!” he yelled.

Holly looked away, crying. She had no counter argument; how could she?

“I should give you even just an ounce of the pain you selfish creatures inflicted on her. See how you like it when no one’s around to help you,” he growled, and mauled one her breasts roughly. Holly yelped and finally met his eyes. Somewhere in those dull eyes was the mother who’d been his friend, but he couldn’t find her anymore.

“If that’s what’ll make things right between us... then do what you have to,” she said shakily.

Leon took his hand from her throat and shoved one hand into her panties to rub her pussy and the other under her shirt to grab at her small breasts.

The hateful person who’d surfaced to strangle Lily was at the wheel, and the gentler person who’d been born out of his love for Jessie stepped further and further away from the controls.

Leon tore off her pencil skirt like a part of him had always wanted to, and impatiently spun her around so her face was toward the wall and her ass was sticking out towards him. He didn’t want to see his mother’s face for this next part. All he wanted was his animal instinct to drive him toward her punishment, and that’s exactly what it did as he yanked down her panties and pulled out his dick, positioning his pulsating cock head between her outer lips. They were dry.

So what? The more it hurts her, the better.

He could hear her crying, but it only fed into his desire to enforce his own brand of righteousness. This was what that man had done to Jessie, and her pain was 100x worse still.

“Scared? Tough. Imagine how Jessie felt,” he said, and pulled back. One thrust was all it would take, and then sweet, sweet vindication would allow him to finish the job.

“I always prayed this day... would never come.”

“People like you always do.”

“The day you became like your father.”

The words skewered him like spears.

The madman at the wheel finally relinquished his place, and the animal returned to its cage. Once they were gone, Leon was able to take in the scene in front of him with clearer eyes.

His mother sobbing against the wall in this dark hallway, dry and exposed in front of his repulsively erect cock. Leon looked behind him and saw Jessie’s room through her open door, a place of sanctuary for the two of them that was too holy for him to return to now.

This isn’t justice, he thought, sickened with himself. This is...

It was his descent into becoming the kind of man that Aaron—the man he used to call Dad—was. The kind of man who would’ve hurt Jessie.

His cock gradually deflated, and both mother and son stood in the hallway breathing heavily. Despite the revelation, an alarmingly large part of him wanted to **** her anyway. Jessie was gone, so what did it matter what kind of man he became?

Conflicting emotions dueled for supremacy while he stared down at his mother’s bare lower half, and finally one of them won out. He knelt and yanked her panties back up, but he wasn’t gentle about it. They bit into her pussy and made her gasp in pain.

He **** her to turn toward him again. Holly’s makeup was a mess, streaking rivulets of mismatched color crisscrossing down her face.

“I’m not going to let your failure ruin my life too. I’m not gonna **** you, Mom.”

She looked gave him a tired look and picked her skirt up off the ground. As she fastened it back to her waist she said, “I don’t want to be the reason you turn into him. I think-“

“You want me to leave, right? Way ahead of you. Just because I’m not **** you doesn’t mean I don’t hate you. People like you...” he didn’t bother saying it. The wounded look in her eyes told him that she already knew.

“I’m out of here.” He’d retrieved Cammy from the floor before opening the bedroom door for Holly. He couldn’t say why, except that he felt naked without it, but it was just as well. There was no place for him in that room anymore, if there ever had been.

“Leon,” his mother called. He stopped his descent down the stairs but didn’t turn around. “You can still be better than us. Both of you.”

“We always were,” he replied, and then continued down the stairs.

Severe pain like nothing he’d ever felt before suddenly reverberated in his skull when he walked out the front door. It felt like his bones were breaking apart and digging their jagged edges into the soft flesh of his brain.

Am I having a brain aneurysm? he wondered stupidly, and slumped down onto the porch, narrowly avoiding slamming his head into the concrete. If he thought it would stop the pain in his head he would have cracked it open himself.

Just when he thought he was surely going to die, it stopped. Cammy shocked him as he tried to reorient himself. Kicking me while I’m down. Definitely her style. Her? Whatever.

It took a few minutes sprawled out on the porch before he was ready to check Cammy.

A Soul Link has been severed. All Chronicle System interference with Holly Marshall has ceased, rendering her advantages unusable.

“Is that...” he had to catch his breath again before continuing, “...is this migraine from hell related to the Soul Link severing?”

Yes, Leon Marshall. Soul Link severance is akin to emotional brain surgery, and seems to be quite severe.

He gritted his teeth and said, “Seems to be?”

I have not experienced this pain first hand, and it is possible you simply have a shockingly low pain tolerance. As such, I cannot say with certainty that the pain is severe.

I’m gonna show YOU severe pain in a minute here. Something came to him. “My mom. Did the severance hurt her as well?”

Holly Marshall experienced an equal level of pain.

“Good.”

An unusually cold-blooded declaration to hear from you, Leon Marshall.

“A lot of things have changed.”

You no longer wish to help potential models in need?

“I... I don’t know the answer to that right now. I just need to find somewhere to stay,” he said. It took effort, but he was able to stand up and sling Cammy over his shoulder, effectively ending their conversation.

The first thing he did was check the gazebo in a vain hope that he would find Jessie curled up there and everything would magically return to normal between them. All that he found were a couple memories.

Then he tried texting Ophelia.

Leon: Yo. Any chance you have a place I can crash at?

Twenty minutes later he had no answer, so he couldn’t rely on that option. Salty air broke across his face when a gust enveloped him, but then it moved on and rattled the chainlink fence. He looked over at it unthinkingly, and noticed a light on just beyond the metal fence, in Lily’s room. Year’s of stalking his neighbor gave him the handy knowledge of which window was hers.

She’d never let me stay with her.