Descry
For Yuletide 2012
Humanity has always sought to cage the beauty of the present moment, to deny the nature of change. Time will always flow onward, swell above their pitiful attempts to cling. This is the truth: the natural way will always overcome.
It is their duty – his duty – to preserve what he can, to protect those who would be victims of humanity's delusion. It is their place to remember the past in its entirety, to see the wonder and the terrors and the horrors and the fire that purges so that things may be nourished from the ash and grow.
He cannot change the humans, wrapped up in their fallacies. They cannot see the truth, and in their blindness, they destroy. Everything has its way, his grandfather says, but theirs is only one of anger. He doesn't understand his father's laughter until he lives among them, and even then, he wonders if it is through indulgence or something else that he can see the good in them. They don't know the weight of the lives that hang about their artificial society. They strive, and they try, and they do not understand their animal nature.
It is as amusing as it is delicious.
The first time he sees D after so many fucking years, he follows him back to the shop in Chinatown and barges in, gun blazing. D looks at him, as dispassionately as if he were a bug on the sole of his shoe, and doesn't say a word. The shadows around him darken, and the next thing he knows, he's thrown out on his ass in the street by some freaks in animal fetish costumes.
They're real animals, illusions and magic bullshit. Fuck if they don't look like some of the freaks he'd picked up on the force. D might have more compassion for a bug than him, a human, but fuck, he wants answers, and he can't stop, not now. Not he's found what he's been looking for.
He sees the detective skulking in the shadows, a hunter after prey. He can smell the desperation through the door even before he charges in. He looks at him, just looks, and the pets take care of him, as gently as they can.
D makes a pot of tea and sits in his chair and doesn't touch it. The pets worry, but there is nothing they can do; his fingers stroke absently against their fur and skin.
The second time Leon sees D, he waltzes in and sits down like he owns the place. D doesn't chase him out but he doesn't greet him, either. D's got a customer he's simpering at, helping him pick out a cat or dog or whatever. Years ago, he wouldn't made some noise and got his attention. But it aint like that any more.
Ten minutes pass without acknowledgement and Leon leaves; curious and knowing eyes watch him go.
He knows the detective is nothing if not persistent. He will not be turned away by silent treatment. That is why the third time is no (unwelcome) surprise.
Leon aint a quiet kid but he's not the one banging kids against the wall in the school yard. He's happier playing in the street with his friends than studying, and he aint that smart to begin with, either, but once in a blue moon he gets a B in class and his mom finds it cause to celebrate. Sometimes his pop comes, if he's home from the force and not sleeping off a bad shift, but that sometimes is almost never so it's usually his mom and him somewhere nice. Somewhere cheap.
So, this one time he's eight, young enough to be getting wise to the world but not talking back too much yet, and his mom takes him to the zoo. They don't even have to pay, along of it being the free day where everyone and their grandma comes out to stare. It's big and wild and fun and, hey, the lion jokes haven't gotten too old yet and he laughs.
The elephants were freaking huge, it's the first time he's seen them up close, and no way, no matter what his mom says to his friends years later, he was not scared of the snake when it moved.
What he remembered most, and not because his mom had told it to him enough times that it stuck, was the bird house. Not what you'd expect, but hey, he got to feed the overstuffed pigeons and that was better than just looking, right? Anyway, the attendant lined all the kids up against the railing and handed them something special the birds ate. The girl next to him was squirming about touching worms, which he wouldn't have minded, honest, but the attendant side-eyed him and stuck him with a grape. Freaking puny ass grape.
Leon can't help but fidget with frustration, and even when his mom frowns at him it doesn't stop him; she's not next to him, she can't do anything. So he looks up and sees this bird, right, huge as a vulture but bright as a parrot, he swears, more colors than a rainbow. It just gives him this 'look', you know? All conspiring and that. So he throws the grape – the attendant stops talking – and the bird swoops down and swallows it midair. Everybody's stunned, so he grabs another grape from the cart and throws it; the bird catches it again. Pretty soon, the whole like of kids are throwing their food in the air and a whole mass of birds is picking it out and parents are screaming and he's laughing until his mom boxes his ears and drags him out of the zoo by his ear. He's not allowed to go back until a middle school field trip, and even then, they keep him away from the birds, and most else, actually, teacher standing by his shoulder the whole time. Which might have had more to do with punching Danny Gee's lights out for one lion joke too many, but fuck if he'll admit it.
This is how Leon knows animals can get you into a shit load of trouble before ever meeting D. And it's the first thing he thinks of when he sees the bird on the kids arm, right in the middle of the park in broad daylight, wings and ruffled feathers that overlap with jewels and flowing-fucking-robes if he looks too close. He knows that kid, the one from earlier, and the other kid-bird- shit, whatever, he knows the thing with the kid because it's the same kind of bird that'd looked at him when he was the kid's age and, fuck, that was also one of D's. (It had kicked him out on his ass, it was fucking strong.)
The kid turns and looks at him, open and inquisitive, like the better half of D's customers (the ones more likely to survive.) The bird tilts his head at him, mirroring the kid's look, and ah shit they could be twins. Goosebumps break out on his arms, and he looks away; turns on his heel, walks casually in the other direction. Leon turns a corner and stops, several meters and a sectioned wall between himself and the kid.
He feels like a creep, scoping out a kid. Not the kid's fault, not nobody's fault but fucking D's. He should go give him a piece of his mind, yelling and arguing just like the old times. Not like he's been waiting for an excuse to go back to D's ice princess attitude. Not like he wants to go back to not know, to just wondering. He doesn't want anything but answers, but fuck if D ever cooperates.
Not like it's been a fuck ton of years at a standstill of not knowing where he was, if he was alive, if he could be found. Not know if there was some Chinese Noah floating around the fucking clouds and laughing at all the poor saps who weren't worthy of being on his fancy boat.
Fucking shitdamnit, he can't keep thinking about this. (He aint drunk enough for this.)
When he was young enough to need an adult's minding, he and his grandfather wandered the farthest reaches of the land. They saw the travesty of the humans first hand, and yet, avoided interaction entirely. Their kind does not measure time as humans do; he doesn't know the age when his grandfather began to leave him alone. He wasn't yet grown, able to fend for himself. Old enough, though, to intimidate any attempted predators. In other terms, he came up to his grandfather's shoulders and had learned to pass among the humans as harmless.
Once in a human city, during those times, he was left in a big glass house with the birds. He sat and talked with them; they were not as he'd expected.
"Why do you stay?" he asked them. There is a blue sky on the other side of the glass.
"They feed us," one says.
"They act funny when we fly," says another, to a chorus of agreement.
"We like it here."
He looks at them, their healthy bodies and the scents of humanity on their wings. When he closes his eyes, he sees the fires that humanity sets, destruction without the pause for rebirth, and does not understand how they can be so contented like this.
Years later, he sips his tea and thinks, Ah, to be young., and looks at his own gilded cage. He can taste the sweet fruit of their labors, these human animals without the sense to look after themselves. He can see their treachery and their hope and their struggles against their own selves and know that no other creature is quite so desperate as they. He can pass among them as one of them as they ignore their senses, wrongly assume: odd but harmless.
Despite knowing the freedom of the outside, he can remain in the wilderness no longer. He has become contented here, in this hold of his own people's making, despite the disruptive influences that seemed to plague it.
D glanced at the clock - 9:00 PM - and then at the door. When an intoxicated detective slams it open, he is not surprised.
"Every one a'your shitty animals has got a creepy fucking stare," Leon mumbles, stumbling down the stairs and flopping into the couch opposite D. He makes a grab for the tea cup D had set out already. D smiles blandly at his attempts, three, before he manages to grasp it.
"You've begun early this evening, Mr. Detective. May I ask for the occasion?"
"Creepy fucking stares," Leon mumbles again into his tea cup.
"My dear detective," D begins, settling his tea cup down with a frown, "please refrain from insulting the inhabitants of my shop."
Leon moves to take another sip. His spoon is still in cup. D shudders at the bad etiquette. Surely he'd taught him better by now? "Isn't an insult if it's the truth."
Anger flairs, and he can't help himself; a force of habit years unused rears up and he shouts, "Mr. Detective!"
Leon startles and spills his tea all over himself. "Wha- hot, hot!"
D pointedly huffs at his behavior, suppressing irritation that comes to a head as the detective uses a lace doily in a frantic attempt to dry himself. It's not pouting, it's more an escape from the sight of him. His hair the same shaggy blond mess. His clothes, rumpled and unkempt. The smell of cigarette smoke that clings to him even in the incense ladden air of the pet shop. It holds an air of the past he doesn't want to expose himself to. It can never be the same, now that the detective knows the truth.
Leon throws the doily across the room, muttering about rags and expensive things, and it is almost too much to hear that horrible human murmur permeate the shop again. D takes a moment to collect himself. One of the snakes slithers into his lap and he idly strokes her head; a reassurance.
"My dear detective," he begins with precise inflection, "may I ask why you've come?"
Leon quiets at that, and becomes unnaturally still. The detective's gaze focuses on him, all the more fiercely intense for the blood shot portions of his eyes. "What was I supposed to do, D? You left. Pushed me right on out of that ship and kept going. Thought you might've-" His voice cracks. "Hated me, hated Chris for a while but fuck, D, the only leads I got were that drawing and your face. Hell, those weren't even leads."
He runs a hand through his hair and just looks at D. His eyes are watery. Any other human, he would expect them to sob, but Leon shows too much control. Any other human, D would not allow to see him falter.
"Chris' drawing..."
Leon relaxes - D hadn't realized he'd been so tense - at something in his voice, his expression, and pulls out an envelope from his pocket. It's crumpled, folded, but whole. The pets around him still, staring intently from their places in the shadows, the ones old enough to remember Chris shushing those younger. Leon hands it to him like a white flag of peace, keeping quiet, staring him down like a starved man. His hand drops back into his lap, posture limp but barely easy. He clearly does not expect it back.
D holds his gaze only a moment longer; unfolds the paper reverently. He runs his finger along the crayon lines. There is brightness in this work. Innocence, and a deeper meaning. (There is love in this work.) This, perhaps, of all the creations of humanity, was the most important.
"Well," Leon says, startling D out of his thoughts. "I better get going." He makes a struggled attempt to stand, but wobbles and falls back into the couch.
"Mr. Detective-" D begins, but Leon interrupts him.
"I aint a detective no more, okay? You don't got to call me that."
Nothing can be exactly the same as before, but...
"Leon, stay the night. You are in no condition to travel unaccompanied."
There is a beat; there is a moment where he hesitates, but: "...fine."
...that will not keep them from trying.