Chapter Text
The tape recorder clicked, and it was followed by a crackling, relatively high voice.
"I don't have much time. I also do not know if anyone will ever find this, but just know, if you do, you can never tell anyone. I mean that. I will try and tell you as much as possible, but, as I said, I do not have much time, so gods know how much I will be able to tell."
Leo froze. He was sat under a work table in the far side of bunker nine, surrounded by relics and knick knacks from the civil war. What was a tape recorder doing, here? They weren't invented until 1928.
He turned the ancient relic once over in his hands, tuning in with the tape again, acutely aware that he'd probably missed something vital.
"It was not long before they found them. These tunnels weren't the best hidden- we had not had time for that; we are at war, for Lord's sake- but none of us had expected them to be found that quickly.
"We awoke to deadly silence across the camp. Bethel figured out what was going on first. She had mentioned a few days ago that she'd seen some figures in the woods when coming up here, but, at the time, had brushed it off as paranoia. I don't know why they hadn't taken a shot at her then. What was stopping them? They were waiting, I suspected. What for is a diff- oh, gods!"
The tape cut off as quickly as it had started. Leo was left alone again in the silence and the dark. Who were they? More importantly, tunnels? Now, Leo was no child of the underworld, but he'd been down here enough times that he was 90 percent certain that he would have found them, if they'd even existed.
Leo could feel his heart pumping in his chest. He'd been down here by himself for weeks. Most people still didn't know that bunker nine existed. Bashing his head on the way up, Leo rose from where he'd been huddled, and began frantically searching. What for, he wasn't sure. Anything, really. There had to be something that might help explain that tape.
Just as he was filing through papers filled with diagrams and notes, something happened that he hadn't quite expected to happen. Leo was still holding the tape recorder as it exploded.
Well, it could have been worse. Leo still had his memory, and somehow his hands were intact, but that was mainly due to how anticlimactic the explosion had been. It was more of a pop! than an explosion, really. This pop still left a thick layer of soot on his face and the work table, however.
Leo sighed in defeat. He must have been checking for ten minutes in the same area, and there was nothing here. He wasn't sure how much value the tape would've been, anyway. It was old and decrepit, and Leo shouldn't really have been surprised that it exploded. He was still trying to figure out how it even existed 60 years before it had been invented, but he wasn't going to go there now.
Whatever was going on, all he knew was that he needed to find the tunnels. Something had happened down there 150 years ago, and he needed to know. Wiping the soot off of his face, he went to do something he wasn't looking forward to- fuck the consequences of not being anyone; he needed help- he went to go find Hazel Levesque and Nico di Angelo.