Warnings: no beta, OOCness, English is not my first language, inconsistent tenses, i am very bad at prepositions, some curse words, some alcohol-drinking
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended.
Dedication: This fic is dedicated to the three plants my friend gave me. May they all live and thrive, even though I don't know the first thing about taking care of plants.
A/N: i went to a friend's house the other day and she gave me these plants and since then the idea of leon being a plant dad has taken root (ha!) inside my brain. i may have gotten some facts wrong, so please feel free to educate me
Helena was carrying two boxes that obscured her vision, so when she heard Leon say that it was all right for her to drop the boxes on the table, she immediately did so. They were quite heavy, and it was nice to not see the brown of a cardboard box right in front of her face.
The first thing she noticed was the plants. Leon had house plants. House plants. Leon took care of freaking house plants. She had imagined Leon's flat to be impersonal, dirty, and drab, and while she got the dirty part right—she wondered how long those dishes have been in the sink—she didn't expect the splotches of green in Leon's otherwise bare flat.
"You have house plants," she said. They were in his kitchen, and she saw a couple of hanging planters, and then some pots of succulents on the windowsill above the sink.
Leon opened the fridge and took a bottle of beer. "These are low-maintenance house plants. They can thrive even if I don't water them. You know how our work is—we don't know how long we'll stay in the place we're deployed at—and most of these plants can handle some neglect."
She accepted the bottle of beer Leon gave her. His dining table was situated near the window—succulents and cacti rested on its sill—and there was a potted plant at its centre. "You've got basil."
He sat on a chair and she followed suit. "I do. Makes for nice, fresh pesto."
She raised an eyebrow. "You cook?"
"Only when I have time. And we don't have time right now." He gestured to the boxes. "Do you wanna order pizza?"
She shook her head. "I'm out of here once I finish this beer." She stood up and toured his kitchen, taking note of all the greens on his counters, shelves, and windowsills. He had a tiny herb garden, and then some more succulents, vines, and even flowers. It was refreshing to see this unexpected side of Leon. Though his place had the potential to turn into a pig sty if he didn't clean up any sooner, his plants looked healthy and, dare she say, happy.
Her gaze landed on his fridge. It was covered in fridge magnets from cities all around the world. She strode towards it and mentally read the cities the magnets hailed from—Reykjavik, Zurich, Amsterdam, Osaka, Shanghai, Batanes, Bali, Bangkok, Singapore, Cairo, New Delhi, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Barcelona…There were a lot of magnets, and they covered almost the entirety of Leon's fridge door.
She heard Leon's footsteps come up from behind her. "Were you deployed in all of these places?"
"Some of them," he replied. "But most of them, I visited as a tourist."
"A tourist, huh?" She took a swig of her beer. "You love travelling?"
"…That's…one way to put it."
She looked at him. Although she detected a hint of hesitation in his earlier statement, his expression was anything but; he was looking fondly at his little magnet collection.
He had the look of a man in love.
It was easy to put two and two together, and she nodded in understanding. "I'm guessing you met a certain lady in these places?"
He narrowed his eyes, looking warily at her. "What makes you say that?"
Helena rolled her eyes. "Leon, please. You're not being subtle. And now, I know the real reason why you're always so insistent on taking holidays."
He sighed. "It's not easy to coordinate our schedules. I'd be lucky if I spend more than five days with her." He took a magnet from the fridge—one from Florence—and cradled it in his hands and looked at it tenderly. "But I spent eight days with her in Florence." He looked at her, eyes bright with unbridled affection for someone who wasn't there. "Eight days, Helena. Eight uninterrupted days." He placed the magnet back in the fridge, and for a moment, he looked so lost in his memories that Helena was loath to interrupt him.
But she had just finished her beer and she wanted to go home. They have been cooped up in the office all day looking for a paper trail that may or may not be there—a paper trail which may or may not help in their case against a politician suspected to be a member of The Family. She helped Leon carry boxes upon boxes of documents to his car. She would have gone home once she finished loading the boxes, but her car was in the repair shop and Leon offered to drive her home. And when she saw how many boxes he needed to haul up to his flat in the twelfth floor, she took a pity on him and offered to help bring them up. Not to mention that she herself had her own set of boxes to take home.
"Well, I gotta go," she said. "These documents wouldn't read themselves."
Leon took the empty bottle of beer from her and placed it beside a pot of aloe vera on the counter. She followed him to the living room where she spotted what she thought might be terrariums placed on a table near the window. The room also had plants here and there, even more than the kitchen. There were two stalks of a bamboo-looking plant in a pot on the coffee table, vines from suspended planters, large pots of plants with huge leaves, some flowers, and more succulents and cacti.
She never noticed all these plants before because of the boxes that she was carrying, but now that she was seeing them, her earlier impression of Leon's flat being impersonal and drab vanished. The splotches of green brought character to the place, and she noticed a curious piece of decoration—six red-and-black butterflies mounted inside a frame. Leon's flat might not be the cleanest, but it was lived in and it looked like home.
She was still staring at the butterflies when Leon spoke.
"Got that from a flea market in Nanjing," he said while he looked at the frame. "Reminded me of her, so I immediately bought it. She made fun of me for being sentimental." He chuckled. "Then she took me to a shrine. It was a custom there to write your wishes on a red ribbon and tie it to a tree. The higher your ribbon is, the more chances for your wishes to come true. She challenged me to write mine in Chinese. I speak conversational Mandarin and can read about a hundred characters, but I can't write for shit."
"You speak Chinese?" That was news to her. "Then when we were in Lanshiang…"
Leon shook his head. "The city of Lanshiang spoke Cantonese, and the signs were written in Traditional Chinese. I can only read Simplified Chinese, although there are a couple of similarities between Traditional and Simplified. And then there are the million other varieties and dialects of the Chinese language….So when you say you speak Chinese, you have to be clear. Do you mean Mandarin? Cantonese? Hokkien? Shanghainese?"
She stared at him. She had only known Leon for half a year, and already she was amazed by this new side of him. It was no wonder why he was one of the US' top agents. "I'm honestly impressed that you know all that. Did…she teach you?"
"She taught me a little bit of Mandarin. The rest I learned by myself. The DSO pays a premium if you speak another language, you know," he said with a wink.
"I'll keep that in mind." Learning another language would be a pretty nifty hobby. "And what did you wish for?"
Leon met her eyes. "For the world to be rid of B.O.W.s permanently." He looked back at the butterflies and said, almost whispered, "And to be with her." His tone returned to being conversational. "I wrote that all in English, by the way. I can't write in Simplified to save my life. Then she made fun of me. Again." He gave her a shit-eating grin. "But I got my revenge after."
Helena groaned. "I don't want to hear about that."
Leon cleared his throat, probably in embarrassment. "Right, right. Do you wanna take home some plants?"
She looked at him incredulously. "Me? Take care of plants? Where will I find the time?"
"I find the time," he countered. "Sure, some plants die every now and then, but my plants don't need much water to survive. Some are a bit more finicky about sunlight and temperature, but snake plants and aloe vera aren't. Not much, anyway. They're infamously hard to kill."
Plants…Would it be a good idea to take care of plants? What would she even do with house plants? Could she even keep these plants alive?
"You know, I didn't start taking care of plants because I wanted to," he said.
"I suspected as much. You really don't strike me as a plant-dad type."
He chuckled, then walked towards the coffee table and picked up the bamboo-looking plant. "This is a lucky bamboo. It's not really a bamboo, though; it just looks like one. When I moved into my first flat here in D.C., Ada gave me a pot with three stalks—for good luck, long life, and happiness—as a housewarming gift. Over the years she gave me more and more plants. Some died, some thrived. I brought all of them when I moved in here. Most of the plants you see here are from her."
"So you're just taking care of these out of obligation?"
"Not quite. She said…" His tone was softer when he next spoke. "She said I needed a reason to go back home, that I can't die, because who would water all these plants she foisted on me? Certainly not her. She gave them to me and I accepted them. They're mine now. They're my responsibility now. They were gifts from her and I want to take care of them." He placed the lucky bamboo back on the table. "She said that my hands could be used to nurture life too, and not just kill abominations." He turned to her, and with a grin on his face, asked, "So, you ready to take the first steps into plant motherhood?"
A reason to go back home. When her sister died, Helena felt like she lost all reason to live. However, she immediately obtained a new purpose in life—to exact revenge on the one responsible for her sister's death. After she got her revenge, she threw herself into work so she wouldn't go to sleep every night crying about missing her. The pain was still there—it would never go away—but at least she managed. She was surviving. And now, she needed a reason to live, a reason to not die on the battlefield, a reason to go back home.
"I…think I'm ready for a plant or two," she replied. "But give me the easy ones."
"All right. Just wait here," Leon said before scampering away to somewhere.
Helena looked around Leon's living room. She inspected the moss terrarium, marvelled at the size of the leaves of some potted plants, admired some ferns, and looked at a cabinet where some gardening tools lay. On one of the shelves, hidden behind a pot with crawling leaves, was a picture frame. It contained a photo of woman, her back to the camera, with short black hair and a red cardigan. She was in a balcony, and the Eiffel Tower could be seen in the distance. On another shelf was another picture frame, this time hidden behind a pot of fern. The photo was of the same short-haired woman, but this time, she was standing, with her back to the camera, in front of a large window overlooking a snowy seaside town. There was a man, his back also facing the camera, with blonde-brown hair beside her. He was wearing a blue jumper, and he had an arm wrapped around the woman. A third photograph was hidden behind a pot of spiky-looking leaves. It depicted the silhouette of two individuals kissing against the backdrop of a European city.
"That one was taken in Florence," she heard Leon say. "We toured Tuscany in the following days. The scenery was breathtaking."
She turned around and saw her colleague holding three pots of plants. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"
"Don't sweat it," he said. "It's nothing."
"But you hid them for a reason."
"Yes, but I hid them behind plants in the living room, not in a drawer. They may be hidden, but they were still displayed. I keep thinking about whether I should take them down or not, but…" He shook his head and sighed.
"But you can't, because you don't want to hide your love for her, not in your own flat."
He laughed dryly. "All this incriminating evidence that I'm associating with a spy out in the open…Some government agent I am."
"You don't have to hide. Not in your own place. Although I can see where your concern is coming from." She decided to lighten up the mood a little. "But you can decide on another day if you're gonna hide them or not. How about you tell me how to take care of those plants?"
Leon gave her care instructions for the snake plant, ZZ plant, and three stalks of lucky bamboo—how often did she need to water them, how much sun they needed, the kind of soil she would need, what tools to buy—and told her not to hesitate in asking him questions. It was strange, because when she talked to Leon, they often talked about their job—their job which mostly involved killing something—and here they were, talking about how to keep something alive.
On their way out of his flat, she noticed a pair of red high-heeled shoes on the shoe rack. She didn't comment on it and Leon didn't say anything.
"You said she initially gave you three stalks of the bamboo," she said on their way to the lift, "but the one in your living room only had two." She jabbed the down button; Leon was holding her new plants.
"The one with three stalks died years ago. It needed to be transferred to soil, but I didn't have a lawn and only had pots. So she gave me a new one, with two stalks this time."
The lift arrived. "What do two stalks mean?" They went inside and she pressed the button for the basement parking.
"Luck in love and marriage." He snorted. "As you can see, I'm still single, so I don't think it's working well."
Helena looked askance at him. "What do you mean you're single?" He might as well have said that water wasn't wet and the moon rose in the morning. "What do you call Ada, then?"
He looked at her with a sad smile. "We're not in a relationship. We never have been. This…thing between us…it's complicated."
She thought about all the plants Ada had given Leon, their pictures on the shelves, the traces of her in his flat, how they acted around one another back in Lanshiang, and how he looked when he talked and thought about her. She thought about the faraway look Leon would get whenever he saw anyone vaguely resembling Ada, how he would do a double-take whenever he saw a woman with short, black hair wearing red, how he became tight-lipped whenever he declined invitations to go to the nearby pub. She thought about all these things, and Leon and Ada may not be in a relationship, but there was no doubt that Leon's feelings for her ran deep.
"How long have you two been 'it's complicated'?"
"Sorry, but I can't tell you."
So that kind of information must remain a mystery too. Helena wondered just what kind of things Ada had done for Leon to be this secretive about her. "Have you ever tried un-complicating it?"
He gave a laughter that sounded hollow. "We would have been married years ago had my attempts been successful."
The lift doors opened and they stepped out. She followed Leon to his car and she got in, plants tucked securely beside her. He drove her to her flat where he helped her carry the plants and boxes of document she needed study, and after he left, she thought about where to place her new housemates.
She put the lucky bamboo on her coffee table, the snake plant on a kitchen counter, and the ZZ plant on her dining table. She thought about how her sister would have been excited for this new venture of hers, but not without ribbing her first. She thought about how once she had gotten the hang of raising house plants, she would gift her sister a cactus or two, and then they would bond over their newfound hobby. But her sister was dead and she was alone, and her death draped a pall in her home that now felt like a tomb.
However, she had three house plants now. She was given the responsibility of keeping them alive and she accepted it. She suspected that Leon did this not only because he was being courteous, but because he wanted to give Helena a reason to live, no matter how tiny that reason may be. He gave her a reason to want to come back home, and just the simple desire of coming home was enough motivation to get through another day.
The plants breathed life into her flat, and she felt the pall of death slowly fall away. She would do her best to keep these plants alive, just as these plants gave her a new reason to want to stay alive.
Before she went to sleep, she sent Leon a message to thank him for the plants, and just as when she was about to turn her bedside lamp off, she received his reply: You're welcome. He also sent her a photo of Ada in front of his shelves, holding the pot of ferns that hid her photo. Her back was to the camera, but her side profile was visible and she was looking at the camera, smiling.
Ms Complicated says hi, Leon sent.
She's there right now? she replied.
She came to get her shoes.
I'm rooting for you to un-complicate it.
You're gonna have to wait a long time.
Good thing I'm gonna be alive for the foreseeable future.
And then she turned her bedside lamp off and went to sleep.
A/N: how many headcanons can i fit into this fic? yes.