Title: Living In Clip
Author: Thursday Saint Giles
Rating: PG-13 for Leon's language
Pairing: None. Leon centric, pre D/Leon
Spoilers: End of manga.
Summary: Leon goes from denial to anger to understanding to acceptance.
AN: This is all about Leon. Leon, Leon, Leon. Leon's journey to find D, and in the process, himself. The next part will be D/Leon, so if that's what you want, and you find Leon by himself boring, don't waste your time here, 'cause there's not going to be any action. Well, not any reciprocal action, anyway. I just think that before Leon could ever be with D, he'd need some personal growth…or at least to learn something about himself.
BTW, this is not a song-fic. It is separated into chapters, and each begins with a few lyrics from certain songs. That is all.
Sleep walking through the all-nite drug store,
Baptized in fluorescent light
I found religion in the greeting card aisle.
Art may imitate life, but life imitates t.v.
Cause you've been gone exactly two weeks…
Two weeks and three days.
And let's just say that things look different now.
Different in so many ways.
His dreams, when he remembered them, were rarely pleasant. He was never the sort to hang onto sleep, to linger in the space between sleeping and waking where dreams were never more real. He likes knowing things—facts—that can't be refuted. Since meeting D, his dreams had always been troubling because in some of them D can fly, or is immortal, or drinks blood, and he thinks, maybe that's not so far from the truth. Maybe his dreams are real, and what is real is just a dream. His thoughts were never so complicated before he met D.
So it was no surprise that when he found himself waking slowly, pushing up through a fog of drowsiness, he wished with every fibre of his being to escape the dream he'd just dreamt a little more quickly. Flying boats. Only D could make his subconscious come up with shit like that.
The more he stirred, the more he became aware of his surroundings; the sound of machines whirring and beeping, the sickly sterile smell of a hospital, and the pinch of the tape holding the IV to his arm. He fought the urge to groan. The guys at work would never let him live it down. He got hurt more in one year than most officers did in their entire career. He decided he'd blame D, but was going to have to come up with a reason, yet.
Thinking of D made him pause before opening his eyes. The last time he'd got hurt, D had made such a big fuss, and Chris had been so worried, with wide eyes full of tears. He didn't want to face tears and harsh words right now. He hurt everywhere. It wasn't a feeling he'd associate with having been shot. There was heavy soreness in every limb, every muscle, and every inch of him, inside and out. What the fuck had he been doing? He searched his memory, but all he could think of was the dream he'd just had. It wasn't too surprising, and not the first time he couldn't remember what had led up to an accident after the fact. What was more disturbing was that the dream wasn't leaving him.
Usually, he persistently ignored his dreams the few minutes after waking and they got the hint and left him the fuck alone. This dream wanted to be remembered, and fuck it all, he didn't want to remember this dream more than he'd ever wanted to not remember a dream before. Sure, there was the whole flying boat thing that was pissing him off, and making him mightily uncomfortable, but there was the look on D's face, right at the end of the dream. That look of utter sadness and loss, and the tears—tears. D didn't cry, it was some sort of unwritten rule of the universe. Animals don't talk, boats don't fly, and D doesn't cry any more than he shows any other genuine emotion. Oh, and then there was the fact that D had pushed him away, and that, more than anything else was disturbing Leon. And it was disturbing him because it had disturbed him in the dream, to be pushed away, left behind. He didn't want to examine why. Which meant he wasn't going to open his eyes for awhile. He didn't feel like facing D just yet.
Leon had never liked hospitals. It should be no surprise that he'd been an active child, and as such, he'd had his fair share of scrapes, spills and breaks. From the time he was born til the time he hit puberty, he'd been in the hospital no less than eight times. And if that wasn't bad enough, he still remembered the day he'd been called home from college, coming to the hospital because his mother was in labour. No matter how he tried, Leon still couldn't separate the smell of the hospital from the memories of the day his mother died.
What was worse was that there was no one there to help him pass the time. Jill had visited once, but she was busy with work, and she'd only stayed long enough to break the news. Never looking at his face, clasping her hands in her lap, telling him that they had no clue where D had gone. That he hadn't left a trace of ever even having existed. Leon knew he shouldn't have been surprised, or disappointed.
But being alone in a hospital room, trying to distract himself from bad memories only seemed to leave him with unpleasant thoughts. He hadn't had a lot of time to come to terms with what had happened the night D disappeared, and he still couldn't say what was real and what was imagined, but he knew, soul deep, that he'd tried to follow D, and he hadn't been allowed.
Leon spent a lot of time staring blankly at the television, which played Family Feud, The Price is Right, and 100,000 Dollar Pyramid on a loop, twenty-four hours a day. The nurses were exasperated with him by the end of the first day they knew him, because he demanded, generally every fifteen minutes, that he be allowed to leave the hospital. No one seemed to understand the urgency. But then, no one had ever understood why he'd needed to get D. Hell, he didn't even understand it.
After that first night, Leon's dreaming just got worse. The dreams weren't outlandish or weird, and so often times Leon wasn't able to tell he was dreaming. They were incredibly real so that he could smell and feel and taste his surroundings as if he was really there. A lot of the dreams were so mundane, so simple, that it was like Leon was living a different life entirely in his sleep. Those dreams took place in the pet shop. D and Chris were there, and all the pets, and sometimes Leon and D fought with each other, and sometimes someone came for a pet, but most times they just did what they normally did—discussed their days over tea. Those dreams were bad enough, because in them, Leon thought everything was alright again, and when he woke up alone in the hospital room, it was like falling to Earth all over again.
There were other dreams, though, and he couldn't say if they were better or worse. In them he was constantly chasing D, whether through the corridors of the pet shop, through a dense and dark forest, or through unfamiliar and crowded streets, but in them all, D was always too far ahead for Leon to reach. Leon would call out to him, but D either didn't hear or didn't care to listen. And D never seemed to tire, even when Leon was winded and sore and couldn't go another step forward. That was the point when, as he collapsed to the ground, D would stop and turn and smirk before disappearing for good.
They were only dreams, he told himself. That wasn't how it would play in real life. Because he was, of course, going after D. He didn't think too much about what that would mean. It was easier to concentrate on the thought of finding D, and not the process of getting there, or the motivation behind Leon's now obsessive desire to find D. He could worry about that if—when—he found D. Right now he needed to get the hell out of the hospital.
His doctor had kept Leon pretty much high on pain-killers, and understandably so, as Leon's left leg was basically shattered, his left wrist and forearm broken, and he had several other breaks, sprains, dislocated joints and torn ligaments as well, not to mention innumerable flesh wounds and pulled muscles. The doctor said that a fall from such a height should have killed Leon, and he was lucky. Leon wasn't so sure. He was facing months of recovery time and physical therapy, and he was slowly going crazy from bed-rest. He'drather be dead.
After his long stay in the hospital, Leon was forced to take sick leave. He spent most of his days haunting Chinatown. It wasn't hard to get into the pet shop. The lock on the alley entrance was easy to pick, but oddly enough no vandals had come through. The place looked nearly like it had when D had occupied it. There was a fine layer of dust on everything, and no sounds of animals, no scent of tea, but if Leon sat for a very long time, and let his eyes become unfocused, it was almost as if nothing had changed.
The denizens of Chinatown all knew Leon, and knew of his friendship with D. They all regarded him with pity in their eyes now, and whispered as he passed on the street. Madame C visited him at his apartment to deliver some of her special fruit tarts, and when she'd gone, Leon made two cups of tea and sat out the tarts on his coffee table. He couldn't bring himself to eat them. Whenever Master Chu noticed Leon on the street, he would invite Leon into his restaurant for a free meal. Everyone was overly polite, and Leon couldn't take it, so after a few months, he stopped visiting Chinatown altogether, and thought it was for the best.
When he was allowed to return to work, the Chief kept Leon at his desk, pushing papers and taking calls. It was maddening, but Leon knew he was useless, anyway. All he could think about, even as he filled out dozens of forms, helped job applicants get ready for the academy, and listened to tips over the phone, was D. In the car on the way home, as he pushed himself through physical therapy (probably a lot harder than he should have), as he lay in his bed late at night, staring up at the ceiling and unable to sleep, thoughts of D never left Leon's mind.
The more Leon thought about what had happened, the easier it was to pretend it hadn't happened. Not pretend, no, he would think sternly. Because it hadn't happened. He'd been confused, and there had been so much going on, and he had fallen several hundred feet. He didn't know what had really taken place, but he was absolutely certain it did not have anything to do with magical boats. But even if he assured himself as much, it didn't explainwhy D had gone. It was so sudden, so unexpected. Leon remembered something taking place with a man who looked rather a lot like D, and an explosion, but it was all very fuzzy and didn't tell Leon anything, didn't give him any reason for anything that followed. All he could remember, and know for sure, was that D had seemed so sad to be going. And that made the least amount of sense to Leon of all. Why did D go, if he didn't want to, and if Leon didn't want him to?
That was why Leon felt this desperate need to find D. He wanted answers, and that was all. He just needed to know what had really happened to him, and why D had left, and he needed the proof, at last, that D was as crooked as Leon had been saying foryears. That was all.
His body was taking forever, but it was slowly healing, casts coming off, limbs regaining feeling and the ability to function. His mind, however, and more importantly, his heart, seemed frozen in time, repeating, on loop, the thoughts and emotions he'd felt as he'd plummeted to the Earth.
Leon wasn't exactly sure where to head. The nearest Chinatown that he knew of was in San Francisco, but it seemed to Leon that D wouldn't have made such a dramatic exit if he was only moving a few hundred miles. So, not really knowing where to go, Leon had decided to just go, and see where he ended up. D would probably like that, probably say something stupid and mysterious about letting the road lead him to his destination, or some shit.
It was easier than he'd ever thought possible to walk away from his life. A letter of resignation left on the Chief's desk a few hours before the morning shift arrived, to avoid conflict; sub-leasing his apartment to a rookie cop looking for someplace cheap to stay so he could get out of his parents' house; packing what little belongings he owned that actually meant something to him and dumping the rest. And then it was just him, his car and the open road. Only it wasn't just that no one stood in his way, but that Leon didn't feel the least bit of anxiety or guilt about leaving behind everything he'd worked hard for.
When he thought about it, and he didn't often think at all, it was easy to rationalise. He was the youngest officer ever to be promoted to Detective in the LAPD, he'd graduated Mangum Cum Laude from college with a double major, and he'd done a lot of good during his career. And he was still only in his mid-twenties. He had plenty of time left to go back to his career. How long could it take to hunt down a guy like D? It took Leon a couple weeks before he realised that rhetorical questions could only get him in trouble.
The first stop was in Albuquerque, then onto Phoenix, then Houston. All three cities were large enough to get lost in, and Leon had spent days wandering through them looking for pet shops and perusing the Chinese areas for suspiciously pretty men. Of course he hadn't found anything, and honestly, he hadn't thought he would. Part of him wondered why he just wasn't hopping the first flight to China and searching there. He didn't really have an answer, but he still didn't head to the airport. Instead, he headed north.
Oklahoma, Nebraska, Washington, the Dakotas, Missouri, and each time Leon stopped in a new city he wasn't sure how he got there. When he stopped for the fifth time in twenty-four hours, Leon stared at himself in the mirror above the sink of a dingy bathroom, saw his reflection in the dim, flickering light, and didn't know himself. He saw his eyes bloodshot, his face drawn and he saw a real fuckhead, looking in—what state was he in now?—Colorado for D. Was there even a Chinatown in Colorado? He was betting that, even if there was, there wasn't a dock for flying ships. Colorado was landlocked, he was pretty sure. He wasn't so great with geography. But maybe that sorta thing didn't matter if the ship was flying…
Leon had started learning the rules of the universe.
1.) There is, invariably, a twenty-four hour diner in every town, where he can find, invariably, a waitress named Shirley, age unknown, with over processed curly blonde hair and too much eyeshadow, the very antithesis of D's mysterious allure.
2.) There are no real people, only echoes of echoes of shadows. Every experience related to him is a lie, every face he sees, a mask. There is no such thing as humanity. Suddenly, D's stories seem more real than the human beings Leon moves among every day.
3.) Time isn't linear, it isn't impermanent, either. Leon knows this now, with a desperate certainty. Knows that if he thought about it hard enough, and long enough, he could step into the past and fix things. But for all his fervent knowing, he is incapable of it.
Leon was well aware that he needed to sleep. He could also tell that a shower, shave and good meal were in order, but those…those could wait, because he also needed to find D so he could wring that perfect little neck. The fuck did D think? He could just run out like that and Leon wouldn't care? That he wouldn't hunt him down til the day he died?
It struck Leon that maybe that was exactly what D had thought. Maybe he'd assumed that Leon would move on and just accept everything that had transpired that evening, and forget everything that had come before. If only it was that easy.
There was a devout Buddhist in Montana who seemed to know Leon better than he knew himself. "You have such anger in you," Marianne observed. "You have to let it go."
Leon scowled. He never bought into that when D was around. He hardly thought he'd change now that D had taken off. "Yeah, well, my anger is what keeps me going. It's what keeps me alive."
Marianne shook her head sadly. "No, it's what eats away inside of you. It's what doesn't let you rest."
But how could Leon explain that he simply couldn't rest. No matter how tired he'd become, and only three months into a journey that didn't have any end in sight, he couldn't stop. He couldn't even pause for a breath, because he might find himself too weak to continue. "I need it." It took Leon a second to realise that broken, helpless voice as his own.
"What could be so important to you?" She mused. "Do you even know why you search for this thing? Don't you know you'll be happier if you just let go? Sometimes loss is only the beginning of something else entirely."
"Yeah," Leon said doubtfully, not entirely paying attention to what she said.
"You cannot even be honest with yourself," She murmured.
"Excuse me?" Leon demanded, suddenly defensive. "I'm sorry, I sure as hell didn't come here to be lectured. I don't need your religion or your sage advice."
Marianne did not even blink, her placid expression did not change, and in that she reminded Leon so much of D he wanted to grab her and shake her. She went to her desk and pulled out a journal bound in beads and filled with delicate cream coloured paper. "Maybe, then, you can learn from yourself," She said offering it to Leon.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Leon growled, not taking the book.
"This journey you're on, you don't even know why you make it. You focus on your anger and your hate, and eventually you will burn yourself out. Maybe you're not ready to face the truth, or maybe you honestly don't know. But I think you will find that keeping a journal will help you as you continue searching."
Leon glared at the journal, and some part of him saw the wisdom in what she was saying. Part of him was inclined to believe her, even if he didn't particularly want to keep a journal. But he'd seen and experienced so much in such a short space of time, and he'd never really thought about any of it. Avoidance was so easy, so much less painful.
"Please, this will suit no one but you, I assure you. Sometimes in writing we can understand things that are too abstract and imprecise in thought." She pressed the journal to his hand, and Leon took it, shoving it in his bag and never thinking about using it.
Chicago's Chinatown was distinctly different from the one Leon had known. At first he couldn't put his finger on it, but wandered the streets, staring at symbols he couldn't understand and trying to make sense of it. He spent an entire day simply meandering through the crowded streets, dodging into any store that had a Roman "D" anywhere in the lettering on their sign. It wasn't until he was leaving that he understood the difference. Here, without D's presence, this Chinatown held no mystery. Here the people were loud and obnoxious and everything they had was on sale, bare to the eyes.
Leon wondered if he'd missed something in Los Angeles, if maybe he'd moved too fast. Maybe he should have just slowed down enough to listen—really listen—to what D had been telling him. Now that he understood that, though, he couldn't remember any of the lessons D had attempted to teach. It was like out of D's presence his words evaporated and lost meaning.
In Chicago all D's stories couldn't seem less real. Chicago was dirty and shining and bright, and unicorns, mermaids and talking racoons didn't exist here. Sure, Leon had never believed in the first place…not entirely, that is. Sometimes there had been a niggling voice buried deep inside Leon that insisted there was no other explanation for the things he'd seen. But then, Leon was really good at coming up with rationalisations for just about everything. He'd always been proud of that before, told himself he was a man of logic, but now he wasn't so sure it was that great of a trait.
Leon left Chicago deep in thought, and didn't even realise it until he arrived in Bloomington, Indiana. He ran into a group of students in the campus museum, and they were, for whatever reason, intrigued by him. Since he was getting pretty low on cash, he took them up on their offer of dinner and a night at their apartment. He had forgotten how it was in college, the big ideas tossed around over dinner, the profound thoughts shared over a joint. He'd forgotten how eager he'd been to learn things. How open he'd been to life and experience before his mother died (too soon), before he became a cop (too young).
They ate in a small Greek restaurant near the campus. Leon had never had Greek before…well, other than the Gyros he occasionally bought from a vendor on the street corner outside his precinct building. The students laid before him appetizers of cheese on fire, lamb cooked to perfect tenderness and something like rice but smaller and softer, desserts of flaky pastry and sticky-sweet filling. It made Leon think of D, how before D he had never really had Chinese food, and how D delighted showing Leon new food, and having Leon enjoy it. He had liked watching Leon eat almost as much as he liked to eat desserts himself.
"So you just one morning decided to go all Kerouac?" One of the students, Jimmy, asked over the main course, obviously eager to hear Leon's story.
"Man, I think that's hot!" Steve said. "I'd totally do the same if my mom wouldn't skin me alive. 'Steven Marcus Arwen, I did not work two jobs to put you through school only to have you waste your time travelling cross-country!'" Steve shook his head and he and Jimmy shared a sympathetic glance.
Leon gave them a half-smile. All he could think was how much he wished his mother was still around. Maybe she would have soothed him, maybe she would have stopped him from quitting his job and running away from his life in pursuit of something he might never find again. Something he didn't even know why he was chasing.
"Come on, Leon, tell us why!" Demanded Stacy, a girl with lots of curves, a deep tan and curly hair the same chocolate colour as her eyes.
"Um…well…I uh," He didn't know how to tell them the truth, knew they would only take it the wrong way, twist it all around. "There was this suspect of mine—"
"Dude, you were a cop?" Steve asked.
"Detective, actually, LAPD. Anyway, I never could prove anything, but I always knew something was up. He skipped town a couple months ago, put me in the hospital in the process. The force wasn't going to do anything about it, so I decided I'd do it myself," Leon explained. It wasn't quite the truth, it wasn't quite a lie. They didn't need to know the whole damn story.
"Wow, so you've gone all Lone Gunman," Stacy observed, wide-eyed and impressed.
"Dude, I didn't realise bounty hunters actually existed," Jimmy said.
It didn't seem fair to D to let them think of him as some hardened criminal (no matter how often Leon had tried to convince his colleagues of that in the past). For some reason, Leon wanted to explain better, but knew he should just leave it alone. How could these kids understand what he was after, when he didn't know, even?
That night they sat on the porch of the apartment drinking a six-pack. The night was blacker than black there, lit only inconsistently by the flickering of lightning bugs. Leon listened, really listened, though didn't contribute, as the housemates spoke of theology, and then moved on to speculate about magic and extraterrestrial life. Their words, the thickness of their voices, the heaviness of the alcohol in Leon's blood all had the effect of making Leon drowsy and imaginative, and he saw clearly in his head, the images their words invoked. Somehow, D was ever present throughout it all, something religious and supernatural all at once.
After Jimmy and Steve went to bed, Stacy took Leon by the hand and pulled him to her bedroom. It wasn't until she stood before him, lifting her shirt over her head, that Leon even understood exactly why he was looking for D.
"Sorry, I really can't," Leon had told her, in what he hoped was a gentle tone of voice, and he slept on the lumpy couch in the living room.
Well, maybe not really slept. He opened his bag and took out the journal, looking at it, considering for a moment, before turning to the first page.
So I guess Marianne maybe knew what she was talking about. Shit, this is awkward. So fine, D, you fucking win…I get it now. I hope somewhere you can see this. I get it now, all your stupid knowing smirks and sly expressions, and the "Darling Detective" shit. So I was a little slow. You couldn't just have said something? You had to take off instead? I bet you think you were strong, making some big sacrifice, pushing me away. Well I know better now, goddamnit. You were weak. That was fear and cowardice, not some grand noble gesture. Maybe you thought I couldn't ever admit I wanted you, maybe you thought I'd ruin it. But you never even gave me a fucking chance. And I could have done it right, damnit. And when I find you, because I will find you, you're going to know it. You're going to see how wrong you were.
In the morning as Leon was preparing to leave, Steve and Jimmy pulled him aside and gave him a poorly wrapped package. Inside he found a Polaroid camera and several packs of film. "We know you're probably too busy to go through all the trouble of getting film developed, so this way you can still have a record of what you've seen." Stacy took a picture of the three of them together and Leon taped it to the last page of the journal, labelling beneath it their names, the date and location.
"Look me up, when you find what you're looking for," Stacy said, right before Leon drove off. "I'd like to see if it was worth it."
That, Leon knew, really remained to be seen.