Notes: For everyone looking for the notes that originally were posted with this chapter, I've decided to instead post them all in one single chapter at the end of the story, partly to give people a better chance of skipping them if they aren't interested. So please refer to the very last chapter from now on if you want to read them :-)

It took Leon three days to enter the pet shop again, the result of a combination of factors. For one, he had actually come here to work, and this was not the LAPD. He could not simply slink off with his chief rolling his eyes at him and Jill smirking like the Cheshire Cat come to life. Secondly, D had seriously pissed him off. Worried. As if there was any way he could not be worried about that idiot, prancing about Rome with members of opposing factions while Interpol had a whole file on the shop.

But most importantly, he was too scared of returning to the Via Veneto to find D gone once again. As a matter of fact, he stopped and stared at the familiar sign in some disbelief when he finally made his way there. Then wondered if he should go and buy some sweets. He did, after all, have a favour to ask from D.

In the end, he did not. He simply took a deep breath, steeled himself and pushed the door open to be greeted by a parlour that was so strikingly like the one back in LA that he wondered for a moment if he was dreaming.

Tetsu bit down on his leg and he yelped, grabbing the young man by one horn. "What the fuck have I told you about biting me when you look like that?"

"Mr. Orcot, T-chan has no way of knowing how you perceive him."

D had come around the curtain and was looking at him with an indecipherable look on his face. No smirk to be seen anywhere, Leon noted. He dropped Tetsu and stepped further in, closing the door behind him. "You're gonna help me," he said without any kind of preamble and D stared at him.

"Help you? How exactly might I be of assistance, given that I am apparently under such suspicion? Should you even be asking me for help, considering that? Will I not run off to my mafia friends to spill the beans?"

"You're gonna take me along to that fundraiser party Spencer Donald is gonna throw tomorrow and help me install a few bugs around his house," Leon continued as if he had not heard him. D stiffened.

"I will most certainly not do any such thing."

"Oh yes you will!" Leon stepped up to him and pointed a finger at his chest. "Because if you don't, you'll soon find yourself subject to an investigation by more than one country's law enforcement. If you don't want that, you had bloody well better put out here, D!"

"In other words, you are trying to blackmail me again into assisting you by threatening me with incarceration!" D snapped back.

Leon shrugged. "Call it whatever you want, but fact is, your name is on the list with suspected business partners of Spencer Donald's. You've never been hesitant in offering your help with active investigations. How 'bout you stick to that policy?"

"I refuse to be blackmailed into betraying a client."

Leon barked out a laugh. "A client, yeah! You have any idea what kind of business Spencer Donald is running? Maybe he treats the animals he buys well, but do you know what he is up to else?"

D glared at him. "I do not make it my business to nose around in other people's business."

"Then I guess you don't care to know that he is involved in some serious mahogany smuggling? That one of the companies he's a major stockholder of is most likely responsible for destroying at least five square miles of rainforest a day for palm oil production? That he likely is involved in other serious smuggling activities, involving rhino horn and ivory?"

"To my best knowledge, Spencer Donald runs a very successful international shipping company." D sat down, thus taking himself out of reach of Leon's finger, and opened his fan. "That is hardly illegal."

Leon snorted. "Are you really that naive, D? Of course he runs a shipping company, amongst a few other businesses. All of them are perfectly legal. All of them have perfectly standardised procedures for getting stuff in and out of countries." He crossed his arms. "Only problem is, not all of the stuff they're transporting is legal."

D regarded him coolly. "And why would I care about that?"

Leon found himself engaging in a very, very familiar activity – glaring at D full force. "You of all people should be dancing with joy that we're trying to take him out. Weren't you the one always complaining about what humans are doing to this planet? Well, forget the small fish like Jason Grey or Mrs. Hayward. Spencer Donald is a whole new category of eco-criminal. Someone who has so far managed to make sure he's untouchable by sticking to every law imaginable and blaming everything on employees further down the line, even when it's crystal clear someone high up the chain must be involved. He's running a whole fucking transport system for other people's illegal goods, diverting it and disguising it in such a way that it's almost impossible to track the stuff down, and if we manage, half of the time we have no clue who it originally belonged to. It's like fucking DHL for criminals."

D snapped his fan shut and used it to point at Leon's chest. He eyed it, fairly certain that this was not something people with fancy fans (and manners) were supposed to be doing. "Provided that what you say is true, no, I certainly would not mind Spencer Donald being 'taken out'. I do mind, however, your attempt at doing so alone, without any kind of back-up or even permission!"

Leon pushed the fan away and snorted. "FYI, I have permission. It's all cleared with the local chief. They need someone from the outside."

D blinked. "Why would they? I am certain the Commissarios with the Polizia di Stato are perfectly capable of handling yet another criminal. They do have a certain amount of practice."

"They also have a mole in their team." Leon watched it sink in with some satisfaction before he concluded, "Why d'you think they asked Interpol to send someone?"

D opened his mouth, then shut it again. Then spoke. "To my best knowledge, Interpol is an organisation that provides a network for law enforcement to work together across borders. They do not provide undercover agents."

Leon shrugged. "Well, they don't. Usually."

Now D was glaring at him. "Detective, please do tell me you have not embarked on a private vendetta against Spencer Donald and are using your status to cover for it."

"The only one I have a vendetta against is you!" Leon snapped and immediately bit his lip as something suspiciously resembling hurt passed over the pale face.

A fraction of a second later, D was only showing him his generic smirk. "I should have known. Of course you would do something stupid and dangerous. Will you ever learn?"

Leon considered setting him right about the vendetta remark and decided in favour of getting D sorted out on what he wanted him to do. There was too little time left to bother about personal grudges that really were no grudges at all. "Don't be stupid, D, the only thing I'm supposed to be doing is to smuggle a few bugs into his house while he's busy with other things during that party. It's not stupid, it's not dangerous, and I get to do it 'cause Chief Cocuzzi can't be sure if the guys he already has on the inside have been spotted already. I'm doing it so they can stay safe. And hopefully undetected."

D stared at him. "That is an utterly imbecilic plan. If there is a mole on the team, what does it matter whether the inside spies also plant bugs in the house? He will know about their true identity already."

He could not help the groan. "Fucking hell, D, do you have any clue about how such undercover operations work? It's not exactly like they told him their real names when they started working for him, or like their pictures are up on the walls at the station. He may suspect them, but if he actually knew who they are, they would be dead by now."

D sniffed. His nose scrunched up and Leon stared at it for a moment. "I still do not see how asking you to undertake this is less of a risk than having his own men do it."

"A. The bugs would need to be delivered to them in some way or the other, putting them at risk of discovery. B. They will need to plant the bugs, possibly in places that they aren't allowed into, which will put them at risk of discovery. C. If the bugs are discovered, everyone who has had the opportunity to plant them will be under suspicion, thus putting them at risk of discovery." Leon was using the same voice he had sometimes used to explain something to Chris, and D could tell, if his glare was any indication. "So I will be planting the bugs during an occasion when the house is full of people who don't go in there on a regular basis, thus making everyone who attended the party a potential suspect, which in turn takes the focus off whoever is on the inside already. Make more sense to you now?"

There was a short silence before D spoke again. "I don't like it."

Leon snorted. "You don't have to like it. You only have to do it." He turned around. "Listen, I know you got an invitation to that party. I have it on good authority, so don't try to deny it."

"I had no intention of doing so," D snapped, standing. "Where are you going, Detective?"

He spun around to glare at D once more. "Mr. Orcot, D. And I am going back to the local Interpol HQ to finish analysing the data that came in last night so that even if the bugs fail at picking up something of value, we might stand a chance to at least stop the next delivery before it comes into the country."

D was thrown, he could tell by the expression on his face. "But -"

"This is not LA," Leon cut him off. "I have a job to do, a job I have only thanks to you, and I'm damn well gonna get at least that right, okay?"

D said nothing and Leon wanted to bite his tongue off. "I'll pick you up tomorrow evening at half past seven."

He left, ignoring the little blond girl peeking around the corner of the sofa with tears in her eyes. Damn. He had imagined this to be way different. He wanted to sit down with D, drink some tea, talk it through, get a few questions answered, give him Chris's bloody drawing.

Why did D have to go and get himself mixed up with Spencer Donald?

It was all turning out completely wrong, and Leon could not pretend that Interpol file did not exist. He hoped D understood that he was only trying to keep him safe.

Whether it was clear to Leon or not, D knew what he was doing.

Leon was shielding him.

D felt a little bit like throwing up. It was one thing, stoking people's desires and manipulating them into acquiescing to D. It was another thing to corrupt someone like Leon, someone so pure and single-minded and utterly beautiful, until he was a mere shadow of his former self, willing to go against his own beliefs and morals for the sake of a creature like D. He had promised himself, watching Chris leave, that with the departure of the child, he would remove himself from Leon's presence and hope that whatever damage had been wrought already could be repaired.

Of course, he had not taken into account Father and his machinations.

D sighed and rubbed his forehead. T-chan crawled into his lap and he started stroking him. "I should not have saved him. Then he would not be following me now."

They had had that conversation a number of times already. Pretty much every single time Leon had discovered them. Tetsu sighed a little, putting his head on D's shoulder. "You could not let him die. That is alright, Count. Nobody's blaming you for that."

"I never wanted him to stray from his path, T-chan," D continued as if he had not heard, burying his fingers in the fur. "I swear I never did."

Tetsu sighed again. "People make choices, Count. You make choices. So does Leon."

"But -"

"He's made a choice you don't like, fine. We all know that. I bet even he knows that. I mean, he may be a bit dense at times, but he's certainly not dense enough to not understand why you pushed him off the ship."

"He should not be following me." D's fingers tightened in the fur. "He should not be trying to protect me from his fellow human officers!"

"Yeah well, not like he ever cared much about what he was supposed to be doing, did he?" Tetsu winched. "Ouch."

The fingers stopped tugging at his fur and started stroking him instead. "People like Leon are so precious, T-chan. They are the only chance at redemption the human race has." D bit his lip, blinking quickly. "And I have corrupted him."

"He didn't exactly put up a lot of a fight while you were," Tetsu said dryly. "Actually, I rather got the impression he was really into it. Uncomfortable about it at times, yes, but still into it."

D blushed and did not reply. Tetsu sighed once more, turned around and looked up at him. "Don't you think that Leon agrees with you to some extent? He's a police officer, after all. He's seen the nasty side of people more often than not. It's not exactly as if he's never arrested or killed someone himself."

"He may approve in principle, but certainly not of the methods employed." D let his head sink forward until his chin touched his chest. "And what now? Now that he has proof that he can actually catch up to me? He will never stop looking for me now."

He caught Tetsu's eye-roll and glared at him. Unsurprisingly, he was not impressed. It really was most annoying how much he and Leon resembled each other at times like this, and how little D was able to stay angry at them.

"Well, there is a way around that, you know. Sitting down with him and explaining to him why he cannot stay in the shop. C'mon, Count, he's not that unreasonable!"

D wrinkled his nose. "He does not appear to be in much of a mood for explanations."

"You've never been in much of a mood to provide him with explanations," Tetsu said flatly. "Don't blame it on him. You enjoy messing with his head, we all know you do, and we all know why you do."

It felt like he was blushing from tip to toe. "Excuse me!"

"Oh, come on, be honest." Tetsu held his gaze. "If it wasn't for your guilt complex about corrupting Leon, you'd be all over him by now, flirting like there's no tomorrow. You love the fact that he's following you, even when you know you should stop him for his own good."

"I do most certainly not!" D snapped, annoyed beyond words at the implications in Tetsu's words. Soft snickers and chuckles around the parlour had him glaring at the other pets as well. Pon-chan rolled her eyes at him. D picked Tetsu up and set him to the floor. "I will be in my rooms, and I do not wish to be disturbed," he said icily.

More chuckles followed him along the way, and D found himself contemplating simply leaving the shop behind when he left this time. After all, no shop, nothing for Leon to look for.