Slip

'So he's dead.'

An overwhelming sense of loss filled every last inch of Leo's soul.

He never expected to return back home. Not after his second and then third summoning. And yet, in the few thoughts Leo dared to harbor about such a situation, he never spared the possibility any consideration. 

Leo's chest tightened, his breath bated. 

Slowly, Leo closed his eyes, allowing the grief to wash over his soul. Right then, he felt at least two pairs of eyes lock on him, even with his own shut tightly down. 

The grief came… and went. 

In the nigh two hundred years of struggle, Leo has long since grown used to this sensation, the emptiness of someone's place that could never be filled again. 

But, just like in many of the past cases, there was no time for Leo to mourn. Not with a third pair of eyes landing on him. 

'I guess I'm the oldest now,' Leo opened his eyes, taking a shallow thought as he looked back at the group of youths again. 

Once again, he took a step forward. 

In the moment it took him to approach, Leo scanned every last kid in the group, all the way to their finest details. His wasn't a scan of a lecher, though. 

'Weak.'

Putting the standards of all the worlds Leo saw behind, those kids were weak even within the limits of Earth's reality. An average man their age could go up against each and every last one of them. 

And yet…

"Who the hell…" Mark cussed as his eyes drew to his oldest, missing brother. 

It was all he managed to do before Leo casually walked up and just as casually gave his bully of a brother a fat, juicy slap across his face. 

Mark reeled, thrown off his feet by the force of this simple, casual touch of brotherly love.

But Leo's eyes already turned over to the side, where Rob glared him down, hunching down to compress his center of weight. 

"Been a while," Leo threw, still maintaining a casual approach to the situation. 

'There might be a lot of stuff for me to look into, but for now, that's what takes priority.'

Life was no game or a story. And over the course of his many, long years of past adventures, Leo has long since learned what parts of life to value the most. 

And now, in the face of his two misguided brothers, how could he stop to have a reflection on what the hell was going on in the first place?

"Who the hell…" In the tense moment, with Mark's group freezing while the man in question struggled to rebound from the slap, Rob mirrored his younger brother's words. 

"You've had it rough, didn't you?" Ignoring his brother's question, Leo reached out, hesitating only for the slightest of moments right as his hand was about to fall down on the young man's head. "It's been…"

Rob's dark, alert eyes froze when Leo rubbed his hair, only to then widen as an initial realization sparked up into an utter shock. 

"LEO!" A high-pitched shriek came from the unexpected side, where the silent one out of the two girls within the group stumbled down, barely holding on to the edge of an AC box for support. Her bare legs trembled, all the way to where her shorts barely covered her ass. 

With a bright blush exploding on her face, she threw her hands down to cover her exposed stomach and deep cleavage that put a great emphasis on her well-developed chest. 

'That one I hardly need to guess,' Leo spared the girl a glance while raising his hand off Rob's head. 'That means,' his eyes moved over to the girl who spoke out during the bullying scene Leo witnessed. 

'Tina?'

Contrary to Millie, who used to be this cute, little neighbor of the Pesterny family, Tina was the elusive sister-in-law to the three boys growing up. Carol's daughter; who ended up living with her father when her mom remarried into the Pasterny household. 

A distant step-sister that the three of them hardly had a chance to see, yet were all unified in adoration for. 

'To think she would turn into… this….'

Leo spared his step-sister a single glance in the passing, his eyes failing to linger on Tina's exposing outfit or curvy shapes. 

Still, with the shock of the realization slowly taking over her face, a hint of shame appeared in Tina's eyes while her knees twitched towards each other in an instinctive attempt for her to close her legs. 

"It's going to be a long story and I'm pretty much clueless as to what happened since I vanished." 

Done with the scan of his surroundings, Leo simply ignored the four unfamiliar men who made up the rest of the group of young adults with self-worth and self-discipline problems. 

"Leo…" Mark finally managed to recover from Leo's slap, raising his face from down where he collapsed as he cast a shocked stare at his oldest brother. 

"Is that… Brother…" Rob stuttered, his face torn in a mix of emotions much more complex than what one could expect from the older of Leo's brothers after his display from just before. 

"Yeah, I'm sorry it took me so long," Leo lowered his eyes a bit for the first time since he started the encounter. "And in all honesty, I'm as clueless as you are all. As hard as it might be to believe…"

This time, Leo found it hard to vocalize his thoughts. 

'It's not like they are ever gonna believe it anyway.'

Leo took a shallow breath, ignoring Millie desperately attempting to sneak behind his back only to slowly reach out and pinch on the edge of his shirt. Then, when she felt the fabric between two of her fingers, she jumped back, lost her balance, and then struggled to regain it for a while. 

'Like a startled animal.'

Leo sighed and shook his head. 

"You are not dead…" Rob muttered, tears squeezing out from the corners of his shocked-still eyes. "You…"

An assortment of emotions flashed through the tiny, young man's face, from the current shock through disbelief, relief, grief, anger…

"You are not going to believe what happened, and I honestly have no clue what really happened either. What do you call it…" Leo pretended to hesitate, "I was cast away?"

Rob's mouth twitched. 

He was clearly trying but failed to process what exactly was he supposed to feel at the moment. 

And right then, an extremely soft whisper just barely reached Leo's ears. 

"Lee?" 

A sudden, metallic noise followed this faintest of whispers. A short commotion later, right as Leo raised his eyes, a body suddenly came tumbling down in a moment of utter silence.