Title: Missing
Author: Mouse
Rating: R, for Leon's choice of language
Summary: D and Leon are both missing something important and irreplaceable. Set after the end of the manga. This is a sort of prologue to a longer story I'm working on. Angst.
Disclaimer: Pet Shop of Horrors belongs to Matsuri Akino. I am making no money from this work of fanfiction.
Warnings: Spoilers for volume 10 of the manga.

"I miss him."

Fuck. Wish I hadn't said that. Wish I hadn't even thought it. It doesn't really matter that other people heard it, if they did. And assuming any of them can understand English to begin with. They probably didn't hear it. I didn't shout. I think it came out closer to a whisper than anything. I'll just take a slow glance round the coffee shop, try to make it look casual, see if anyone was listening.

Bad idea. That draws people's attention more than anything I might have muttered to myself. Damn. I'm scowling now, without even having to think about doing it. That makes them look away again. Good. It's none of their fucking business where I look, though I bet D would say-

No, it doesn't matter that I said it. It matters that I thought it at all.

I don't know where the thought came from. I did a lot of thinking after he disappeared, and by the time I left LA I'd come up with a whole heap of reasons for looking for him. They were all damn good reasons, too. But missing him? That was never one of them. Not one that ever came to mind.

He's on my mind all the time. It's not like that's much of a surprise, though, since finding him is the whole point of doing all this: travelling from state to state, and then from country to country once I ran out of states, looking for a pet shop that I'm almost sure I'm never going to find and which I'm starting to think I might have imagined. But I never keep thinking that for long. All I have to do is stand up, like I'm doing now, and I know it wasn't a dream, he wasn't a dream.

That doesn't mean that I'll ever find him, of course. Most people would have given up the search by now. Hell, most people wouldn't have started looking in the first place. It's just… I can't quite make the decision to give up. I'm just naturally stubborn, I guess. D used to complain about that, but that's what's kept me looking for him all this time. That and my payout from the LAPD. My pension, I guess it is. God, I hate that word: pension. Makes me sound like an old man, when I'm just an ex-detective, not even thirty and all washed up.

I can't sneak up on anyone any more. Never again. Ever. People turn to look when they hear me coming along the sidewalk, or when they hear the clatter as I bang against a chair in a coffee shop. But they only do that for a moment, usually, until they realise that they're staring and then they hastily turn away again.

That bastard at the next table is still looking at me. Hasn't he ever seen a man with a crutch before? Yeah, buddy. Laugh it up. You ever seen what one of these things can do to the human body? Even better than a baseball bat. I'm not some poor crippled victim. I can take care of myself. You better watch out.

One glare is enough. He's looking down at his coffee now. Coward.

D would have taken that glare as a challenge. We would have been having a standing up argument by now if I'd looked that way at him. We always did. Yeah. He'd be waving his fist in my face, and I'd be grabbing him by the collar and-

And.

I miss our fights. I miss him.

Fuck. Now I've thought it again! The words just won't leave me alone. I guess I'll just have to live with them. Just as long as I don't say them again. That way, no one else has to know.

I've gotta find him. Then I won't miss him any more.

I will find him. I'll just keep searching, take it one step at a time – starting with stopping at the counter to pay for the coffee. Lucky I don't need to know the local language to do that. I just point at my table and grunt a little and the girl behind the cash register gets the idea.

I'm outta there. It's good being back on the street, outside, breathing in the cold air, even if it is dirty city air. Hell, city air is what I'm used to. None of those green fields and blue skies for me if I can help it. That's more D's style.

And there he is again. He's taking over my mind. You'd think the thought of him would fade over time, but instead it just keeps getting stronger. He keeps intruding more and more. Damned inconvenient, and a little worrying, too. The way things are going, I've gotta find him just to stop myself from winding up crazy. I've gotta prove that he's alive. Somewhere.

I can see his face now. I can see a single tear, falling from his yellow eye. That might have been a dream. I don't know. Maybe it was. And, if it was, maybe the dream started before that. Maybe shooting him was part of it, except that the sight of him lying there, covered in blood, seems too real.

I remember the face of every person I've had to kill in the line of duty. They're always there at the back of my mind. All of them. I remember his face, lying there in death. It coulda been D's face. So alike. So exactly alike, except for the hair and the eyes. Oh yeah, and the insanity. Mustn't forget that. After meeting his old man, I'm pretty impressed with how sane and reasonable D turned out.

Sane and reasonable. I can't believe I'm thinking that about him. God, I'd never hear the end of it if I told him that. Still, it's all relative, and his relatives leave him for dead when it comes to being freaky and creepy. Can't believe I'm thinking that about him, either.

And I can't quite believe he's alive. Not really. Not until I see him. Not until I touch him again, and feel him, all warm silk and hot, hissing breath against me. It could have been him, lying there. When I wake up in the night all shivering and sweaty, that's what I've been dreaming of: D, lying there, staring sightlessly up at me and covered in blood thanks to a wound that my gun gave him.

I need to find D, to prove he's still alive. To get some answers. To shake the truth out of him. Yeah, shake him good. Make him pay for-

Fuck! My crutch has gone flying and I'm grabbing hold of a pole to stay on my feet. Don't these Europeans know how to walk down the street without running into people? They should learn to keep their mind on what they're doing and make sure they look where they're going.

God, it's hard to reach my crutch when it's lying on the ground, particularly when a crazy foreigner is yammering at me in some oddball language. Fuck off, buddy. I'm not in the mood, and you don't want to try it on with me. You really don't want to.

Hah! His wife's dragging him off down the street, scolding at the top of her lungs. That'll teach him to mess with me.

I've had it with Europe. Why did I think that D would ever come here, anyway? Asia's where I should be looking. Yeah, Asia. Somewhere warm. Somewhere where he can get lots of fancy silk clothes and no one would look at him twice.

Oh, who am I kidding? There isn't a place on Earth where people wouldn't look at him twice.

But Asia… Yeah, Asia's the place. Maybe not China to begin with, though. I should start somewhere smaller, and a little more American-friendly. Maybe Japan, though I hear the Japanese are pretty damned crazy.

Sounds like the sort of place D might enjoy.

I dreamed the dream again last night. I awoke in darkness, safe in my bed but with the cold of half-dried tears against my cheeks.

I miss him.

I do not deny it. I expected that, knew how it would be, before I pushed him away that final time, and sailed off along a path he could not follow.

I did not expect the guilt; or the dream. Always, before, my darkest dreams have been those of loss, of all that I loved best abandoning me, one by one. Once, long before I left, he invaded my dream, and I watched events unfold and hasten, moving faster and faster to the inevitable end. It was impossible to stop it – impossible to stop him - despite my best efforts. So impetuous, so sure. He would be the death of me, or, at the least, of everything I held dear. Or so I thought.

How, then, did he become the embodiment of all my regrets? I knew, before I left, that I loved as I had never been intended to love. Of course I did. Why else did life in that place become quite unbearable to me? I was well aware that I did not know how to express that love, that doing so was beyond the limits of my kind. I had no choice but to leave. It was the right choice, the only choice – though loving a human in itself should also have been beyond my limits. I can't stop myself wondering about that, entertaining the "maybe", entertaining the "perhaps", despite the torment such thoughts visit upon me.

And so to the dream. My dream, now, is not of my losses, as it has always been since time beyond remembering. I no longer dream of loss. Not loss of my own. I dream of his loss. This time I am the abandoner, and he is the abandoned.

Guilt over a human's fate: it is an emotion as alien to my kind as love for a human. I should feel neither, but there can be no denying that I feel both, any more than I can deny that I miss him.

I miss all of it. For a short, little time we were like a family. I did not know how to love properly, how to use all these strange and difficult feelings, but how I wanted to. Once I realised the truth of my feelings, that want worried me even more than the emotions themselves. They came unexpected and unbidden, but how I welcomed them. Right from the beginning, that part of me just below my conscious mind embraced those feelings, just as my physical self embraced the child, and wanted to embrace-

I miss him the most. More than all the rest.

I loved him; I love him still. I lost him; why cannot I lose this feeling as well?

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. So goes the human cliché. There is no truth in it, like so much that humans spout out without real thought. I did not know love of that kind; I did not wish to love, yet love I did, just the same. I knew loss all too well. I had no wish to suffer more losses. The pain of this loss is different but just as sharp as all the others. It would be a betrayal of so much I hold dear, of so much of what I am and what I was always meant to be, to say that the pain of this loss is not only different but sharper than all the others, so I will not say that. Not here. Not now.

I stand at the bow of my ship, letting the soft, heavenly winds kiss my cheeks and stir my hair. So gentle. Not like him at all. He was as temperamental and tempestuous as a whirlwind, all uncontrolled anger and chaos.

So unreasonable.

So irritating.

So unstoppable.

So full of life and strength.

Broad shoulders, lean and muscular like many a young male animal. Untidy hair I itched to push out of his eyes. Blue eyes, quite unremarkable, really, framed by a brow so often furrowed with anger.

I miss the look in his eyes, right before he opened his mouth and started to yell. That surprised me, at first. I never enjoyed those arguments when they occurred. He really could be a deeply annoying human being much of the time. No one else ever riled me at all, much less with so little effort as he managed. Perhaps that is why…

Truly, I do not understand why. Is this what love is? Loving the unlovely aspects of the beloved quite as much as the redeeming features? He was much in need of redeeming features, that is certain. Loving him because of the aspects of his personality which annoyed me so, rather than despite them? It makes no sense – which seems entirely appropriate when one is speaking of Leon.

Perhaps I enjoyed our altercations. Perhaps I enjoyed them more than I would ever admit, to anyone.

Fighting with him was a heady experience. I can admit that much, here and now, as I stand here alone, with even my pets beyond sight and hearing.

I miss that look in his eyes. The flash of anger as his temper exploded. It was all for me, and me only. When he lost his temper, he was focused on me to the exclusion of all else. Nothing existed save the two of us. He was mine, and mine alone then. Perhaps he could be again.

That last thought intruded, unexpected and uninvited, but in an instant it has taken hold. It will not let me be.

Perhaps. One small, soft word, sibilant against my lips. How can it hold such pain?

Perhaps there is only one way to stop missing him.

Perhaps it is time to reveal myself again, for those with the eyes to see, and so assuage my guilt.

Perhaps.