R&R, ladies and gentlemen! Suspend your disbelief and grant me this boon, to look upon one hellishly delightful horror crossover! Note: In games with alternate endings, specific endings have been chosen, I write VERY much freeform… and DON'T give me gripe about timelines. Flames light my furnace, thank you. ALL reviews are responded to.

First chappie's short. Will get longer. Probably.

Without further ado...

Bound by Fear: As the World Churns

We few, in the wake of hell

Leon Kennedy

---

As he spat the gum out into his personal wastebasket, Mr. Kennedy slammed down the phone. He'd been on the accursed thing for almost an hour, his elbow sore from the angle. To hell with all of them.

Allow a picture to be painted... This picture, a table. Around it sit a few people, seeming haphazard in choice. The room itself is drab and without decor, the table oak though old. Brown... lots of brown. Little does color infiltrate when it is not worn, as this is not a living space. This was fine for Leon Scott Kennedy. What little time they sought to focus upon trivialities, the more the task at hand was emphasized. As Leon's duckegg-blue eyes swept faces from under his sandy wood hair, the man couldn't keep disappointment from his tone. Not that he'd expected to have better news.

"No funding. They would rather choose to ignore the 'problem' rather than let it show up on taxpayers' money. If it did, the populace would apparently panic."

"Let'm panic. If'n everybody jus' sat still and did nuthin', it'd make it one helluva lot easier for the zombies an' monsters an' whoever knows what else to do what they came 'ere to."

"I said the same thing. Apparently, undead aren't enough to get the world up in arms."

The one who'd responded was none other than the detective... called himself Douglas. Cartland was his last name... or so Leon thought. The man was old... but wasn't weak. If anything, Douglas was almost stronger than Leon. It was almost as if, instead of becoming weaker with age, Doug had solidified into some wrinkly, scruff-chinned knuckle in a trenchcoat. The man would have been dismissed almost as a mad hobo to Kennedy, if it weren't for the fact someone else had experienced that strange, twisted nightmare of a story that Douglas had related with such severity. Cheryl Mason.

The dyejob teen wasn't much talk in either of the meetings here they'd had, mostly hung around Douglas as the adults talked... and occasionally made snide remarks. The girl in T-shirt and tight jeans was sane, though, which gave Cartland a bit more leeway. ...At least, until you asked her about her father. Leon had only made that mistake once... But then again, nearly everyone here had lost a loved one or two. Perhaps Leon was lucky. Out of everyone, only he hadn't lost anyone... At least, not like that, perhaps.

"Maybe good... without funding. No... no people."

"Ha, yeah. You wish... like it or not, there's always someone in the way."

"I... sorry."

Timid Mio Amakura and loud Kaylie Winters. The first was found deep in the woods, clutching a camera... the second was someone who'd chosen to fight this sort of thing for real. For life. Kaylie belonged... She was almost born to do this, while the Japanese girl spooked easily from people moving too quickly.

Kaylie had taken it upon herself to find people she termed 'hunters'... frankly, Leon was glad of her enthusiasm, despite her know-it-all attitude. Apparently, the word meant anyone who'd experienced the deeper evils, and recognized them for unnatural. That would mean he, too, was perhaps a Hunter... though whether Umbrella's T-virus qualified as what she quite probably meant was unknown to him… or Las Plagas, for that matter. There was no denying he'd seen the deeper evils, however... No, not in the least.

As for Mio... The girl only spoke broken, warped sections of English sentences. Hopefully, with time, she'd get better with communicating, but for now she knew they were here to ...well, save the world, or so Leon hoped. Really, he didn't know much about the little oriental chick... all they had gotten out of her was 'Camera see the spirit take Mayu', mixed in with either -san or -sama and a few other Japanese words. Regardless, a lot of her language was often misinterpreted... and her normal reaction was to apologize, then be quiet for hours on end.

"It's Ok, Mio, take your time. What's going on, Leon?"

Oh, he'd almost forgotten... Sunderland. James was, out of all of them, perhaps the most sympathetic... the most straightforward, the least ... well, angst-ridden. It was almost as if he'd come to peace with something he'd rather not talk about, but was at peace nonetheless. Sympathetic, brave, most certainly... a little protective of the women present. Women... that term had to be used loosely, Leon couldn't help but think as Cheryl opened her mouth.

"What's going on is that we're boned, Mr. Sunderland. We can't get government funding, the world is being... infiltrated... or something like that by things like ghosts, demons, zombies, monsters, monsters, monsters, cults, and some things we probably don't even have names for. The human race is at an end, and we're probably the ones that did it."

Another succinct observation from the chair of cynicism and teenage hormone that is Cheryl... Leon had grown to expect it. Really, it brought things down to level sometimes... other times, it only irritated.

"The human race isn't at an end, Cheryl. These are not insurmountable odds we're facing, all that any of us have seen are small, townORcity-wide infestations that are compact, efficient, and have individual purpose. The T-virus was Umbrella, We know that. The Las Plagas... I'm still not entirely certain about. Some sort of alien, maybe, although they had a will all their own... kidnapping Ashley, for one. Regardless of that, those two were conscious decisions made by human beings... but ghosts? zombies? What about the fact we have three people here who all experienced 'something strange' in someplace called Silent Hill, two of whom also saw the same in a few outlying areas. Oh, and something about a Lost Village, that seemed to be housing all the ghosts. Did I miss something? What we could have is puzzle pieces, rather than an armada."

Kaylie grinned.

"Totally, puzzle pieces with the zombies... how'd that one bone song go?"

"That's not the point. My point is, the world is, yes, being invaded... but we can use their plans as ways to force them out, rather than box us in."

Kennedy sighed, pulling a gloved hand through brown hair. Was he the only one that saw the possibility?

"Ways 'er not, w' still don't have government funds. What're w' supposed to do without it?"

"…Hip bone's connected to the…"

"We'll figure something out. Right now, we need information. We're all going back."

"Going back where, chief?"

As Kaylie interrupted her muffled singing to ask the question, Leon groaned inside. The answer he was going to give them, not a soul would suffer without sound. No, he would be surprised if Mio didn't run, if Heather and Kaylie didn't go into fits of panic, if James and Douglas wouldn't refuse...

"To the Lost Village... and to Silent Hill."