Leon is dead.
Not yet, not really; his chest is still heaving in sharp, wet gasps, his eyes fixed on the ceiling while his hands grasp uselessly at his ribcage. He's as good as dead, though. There's too much blood pushing through his fingers, much too quickly; it's already pooling on the floor around him, crawling outwards and inching closer to Dan's shoes, but he doesn't dare to move.
Over Leon's labored breathing, the sound of distant footsteps – slow and steady like a heartbeat – gradually grows louder. He was right, then; there was someone after him, is someone after him, and now they've found him.
Daniel presses his back against the wall like he'll phase right through if he just pushes hard enough. There's nowhere for him to go, and no way that he won't be spotted as soon as the unseen shooter steps through the doorway.
They're both dead.
A shadow from the next room crosses the threshold and grows larger, followed finally by the figure itself – a tall man with dark hair and thick-rimmed glasses, dressed in a crisp business suit and holding a handgun at his side.
For a few seconds, he simply watches Leon sputter and gasp for air. Then he looks over to Dan, who shrinks back, wide eyes pointedly fixed on the man's face rather than the gun. He should say something. He should do something.
"You," Leon chokes out instead, his voice thick and wheezing, drawing both their attention. "You... You c-can't..."
The man eyes him coldly. Without a word, he raises the gun to point it at Leon's head.
Dan lurches forward despite himself. "No, wait, don't–"
Another gunshot, painfully loud, and he clamps both hands over his mouth. If Leon wasn't dead before, he certainly is now. Daniel tears his eyes away from the gruesome sight and slowly looks up as the man turns to face him, gun in hand.
He knows exactly what comes next.
"You don't have to kill me," he stammers out. His own voice sounds distant, dampened by the ringing in his ears. "I– I won't say anything, to anyone, if you just– If you let me go, I won't, I won't... I– I wouldn't even know where to start." He makes a sound like a nervous laugh. "You don't– You can just, just let me go, I'm not gonna..."
The stranger watches him impassively as he rambles on. The barrel of the gun remains pointed at the floor, for all that's worth when Dan is trapped in one spot; it might as well be in his mouth.
He can't breathe around it. He runs out of air, and he stops to force a shaky breath into his lungs. "Don't shoot me." He doesn't know what else to say. "Please."
For a few agonizing seconds, everything is still, so silent that he swears he can hear his own blood moving at a frenetic pace through his veins, pulsing against the thick plastic digging into his wrists. Of all the places where he thought he might die...
In slow motion, the man's arm begins to move, and Daniel squeezes his eyes shut.
"Suit yourself." The voice is low and quiet, filling the empty space that the ear-splitting gunshot left behind. It's followed by thudding footsteps, slow and steady like before, and Dan cracks one eye open just in time to see the door close.
Cautiously, he exhales, blinking in the dim light. He's alone. He's alive, and he's alone in the tiny storage closet once more, alone except for the corpse gradually bleeding out a few feet from him.
The footsteps in the next room fade away, and Daniel slumps against the wall, presses his forehead to the pipe that he's still tied to and struggles to catch his breath. His heart is racing way too fast, thudding in his ears and making him dizzy, and he swallows hard against the vaguely metallic smell that's lodged in the back of his throat.
He has to get out of here, and fast, before the man changes his mind about letting him live.
With a deep breath to steel himself, Dan leans forward to examine the crime scene before him. The flickering bulb overhead doesn't show him much, and he'd almost be grateful for that if he could find the damn scissors that Leon must have dropped when he was shot.
He's too far away for Dan to reach anyway, and it's just as Dan is shifting in place to extend a leg toward the corpse that he hears the footsteps in the next room coming back.
The door opens, and he shrinks against the wall and squints against the bright light flooding the room. The glasses-wearing man is back, the gun in his hand replaced with a larger object, bright red and unidentifiable until he begins to pour its contents onto Leon's body.
"Oh, no," Daniel breathes. The stranger shoots him a quick glance before continuing his work with the accelerant, dumping a generous amount of it over the box bearing the DHARMA logo, the discarded piece of drywall, Dan's backpack. "Wait, don't– Don't do this."
He turns to take a step toward Daniel. "You want me to shoot you after all?"
"What– No, I–"
Then he swings the canister forward, and Dan has a split second to shield his face with his bound hands before he's splattered with gasoline. "That's a real offer, you know," the man adds with a slight shrug.
Daniel barely hears him over the panic buzzing in his ears, the burning in his eyes, the bitter taste that catches in his throat like tiny shards of glass, a taste that he can't spit out. "Stop," he hears himself spluttering, "God, please, don't–"
Without another word, the man turns and leaves.
"Wait!" Dan shouts after him, pulling at the zipties hard enough to hurt. "You– You can't do this, please–"
There's no answer from the next room, only the sound of more liquid splashing onto the hard floor.
He's dead. He's going to die. Any second, that man is going to light the end of the gasoline trail he's left behind, leading directly through the open door and into the storage closet, directly to Dan.
Maybe a bullet to the head would've been better.
Daniel's panicked eyes dart around the room and land on Leon. If he could get to those fucking scissors–
A sudden crash in the next room can only be a shelf tipping over, the ensuing avalanche of books a cacophonous series of thuds, and then the splashing resumes. He's going to burn the whole goddamn building down, with Dan trapped inside.
Daniel moves quickly, turns his back to Leon to extend his reach and kicks at the body to uncover the pair of scissors hidden beneath. It takes several precious seconds to maneuver in such a way that he can drag it closer with one foot, but he does, and then it's another few seconds of fumbling to pick it up with shaking hands.
A quick snap through the zipties and then he's free; he rushes forward to grab his pack and the DHARMA box. The fumes from both along with the gasoline soaking into his clothes and dripping from his hair are nearly enough to floor him.
The side of the box explodes beneath his hand in the same instant that a pop assaults his ears, and then he's scrambling through the doorway to duck behind the nearest shelf as a second shot rings out.
"Changed your mind?" The man's voice is angry now, and growing closer fast.
No time to think. Dan holds his breath and counts to three and leaps to his feet just before the armed man reaches his hiding spot, and he throws the box at him, as hard as he can, before sprinting in the opposite direction.
There's another gunshot, or two, or several, as he rounds the corner toward the exit. He trips on the stairs and clambers up the last few steps on all fours, but he makes it; he bursts through the door and darts to the side, toward the front of the building.
He keeps running, and he doesn't stop until he's nearly a mile from the campus, until the adrenaline pounding in his ears wears off. It's replaced by the sound of sirens in the distance, and he's sure he would smell smoke if he could smell anything at all besides the gasoline clinging to his clothes.
He can't stay here.
It's a long walk back to the tiny studio apartment he's called home for the past few months, and an even longer walk from there to the Amtrak station, with only a brief detour to drop his work clothes into the middle of the Huron just before sunrise.
The hour-long wait for the train to arrive is torture. He makes no less than four trips to the restroom to wash his face and scrub his hands raw, and still the sickly-sweet aroma echoes faintly at the back of his throat with every breath. Of course, it could all be in his head; he doesn't get any odd looks when it's finally time to board, at least.
As the train leaves the station, he fidgets with his death certificate, re-reading it again and again like he'll be tested on its contents later. There's no cause of death listed, no disposition method, no funeral information; maybe it's all a mistake, a filing error of some sort.
Only one way to find out.
He folds up the document and tucks it back into his bag alongside the rest of his earthly possessions – everything that he could carry, at least – and settles in for the long, long ride to Los Angeles.