belatedbeliever117 prompted: leorai, things you said with too many miles between us
ooo
Beneath a canopy of gleaming green leaves, Leonardo tips his head back, the warm rain showering his weary skin, spilling over taut muscles, trickling through the intricate grooves of his carapace. Cleansing him.
The journey from Japan to Costa Rica was long and arduous, dogged by the spectre of his failure, leaving him weary in body and spirit. As the dark, thick jungle enveloped him within its savage depths he had at last felt some measure of respite. Here, he could stay - undiscovered and utterly alone - until he had finally conquered this sickness that still grasped him in its awful hold. Here he would stay, shut off from the world and the stain of all his sins, until he knew nothing but his duty.
Perhaps then he could amend the terrible betrayals he had so deviously, so selfishly, inflicted upon his family.
Leonardo opens his eyes and gazes up at the dazzling, layered splendour of the jungle that rises all around him in countless shades and depths of green, in sprays of sparkling fern and heavy, glossy palm leaves, trembling softly beneath the deluge of rain. The dark earth echoes with the force of the elements and he is soaked through, all the way to his marrow, to his very heart. The shadow of that final betrayal will not wash away, the one he had been forced to if this penance was to mean anything at all.
He falls to his knees in the mud, his head lowering as his shoulders are beat beneath the downpour, tearing apart inside.
"I'm sorry, Karai."