paul lejeune
age: 22
Paul Lejeune was the canonical example of the worst-case scenario.
He’d been dragged fighting and screaming from a lost war and sunk his fangs into C Company when they grabbed him, then found he liked the taste of it well enough and stayed on. It was, in the end, a matter of survival.
He had a natural talent for absorption, for knowing just enough to get people to like him, for fitting in. Anyone else in the company would have said that Paul Lejeune was very nearly the beating heart of the company. Even years later his name was attached to the story just as strongly as Jean Chauvin’s when all others had been forgotten, and sometimes that keeps Vat up at night, never certain whether he ought to be furious or merely depressed.
Vat never gave Lejeune more than a single inch of trust. C Company only fit Lejeune so well because Lejeune had made the decision between assimilation or annihilation and warped himself accordingly. He looked and sounded and acted just like the rest of them, so much that they took him at face value, every last one of them. But from the edges of the company Vat had always seen that Paul Lejeune would never be scrubbed clean of the urban wildness that had borne him to life: it was always there, glittering hard and hungry in his mismatched eyes, right up until the day that it broke free and killed him.
Lejeune was the poster child of the new world, all bright smiles and white grins and black eyes, all the while harboring a deep and horrific capacity for violence and a tragic inability to comprehend his own motives. He fought because the world had taught him to fight and nothing else beyond that, and sometimes it confused him, and sometimes it hurt him in turn, but he could never find the words to formulate the question why.
So it broke him, in the end. It drove him right back to the black and wordless void that Victor Tash and Shawn Kelly had tried so hard to drag him out of, and would have dragged him out of again, had they still been alive. But they were both long gone and now the only one left was Vat, who had predicted this moment years ago, who had just enough sympathy in him to understand fully, but not enough to show the slightest bit of mercy.
Vat still maintains to this day that Paul Lejeune had been trying to kill himself. He just hadn’t known how.
