Who: Dan and Leon What: Dan comes to check on Leon after he gets shot When: Not long after Leon got home from the hospital, late June Where: Leon's apartment Ratings/Warnings: Lowish. Some talk about murder Status: Complete
When Leon was in a bad mood, he normally dealt with it by throwing himself into his work or by drinking. Sometimes both. The problem was that now he couldn’t exactly do that. He was on leave from work, at least until he could sit up without pain running through his whole body. At least he had Alex and Chris with him most of the time, and his other friends tended to stop in to pay him a visit. He wasn’t sure how his dream self, a man who only seemed to have coworkers and D in his life, no friends or family to speak of, was going to deal with this, and he kind of hoped that he wasn’t going to have to dream through the long, lonely recovery. Though, with his luck, D would probably stop in to visit him. He’d been there when Leon had woken up in the hospital, after all.
He was watching reruns of an old football game when his doorbell rang. Alex was at work and Chris was at his day camp, which meant that Leon would have to answer the door himself. “Be right there!” he bellowed to who he hoped was Dan on the other side of the door. If he was getting up for his damn neighbours again, he was going to be pissed. It took him a couple minutes to struggle to his feet, and to use his crutch, clutched in his right hand, to make it to the door. He smiled, or grimaced, at Dan when he opened the door. “Glad you could make it, man,” he said, already heading back to the couch.
Dan raised a brow slightly when Leon opened the door. “You coulda just left it unlocked for me,” he said. Then again, maybe Leon was going stir crazy just lying on the couch or in bed staring at the ceiling. It would have driven Dan nuts the first day. At least he’d been lucky enough to not have to suffer a long recovery after his little Dream bleed-over. A little pain in his chest and a slight hobble and stiffness for a few days and that was about it. Resurrection had its benefits in a way.
“Glad t’ see ye up, though,” he said, letting himself in. He produced the small bag he’d brought, in which was the best whiskey he had from his own collection. Nope, Leon wasn’t getting the bottom shelf (or even mid-shelf) fair Dan offered at the Double Tap. He was going to be enjoying the best this afternoon. Under Dan’s watchful eye, of course.
“Let’s getcha settled in and sufficiently liquored, aye?”
“Yeah, maybe I could’ve,” Leon conceded. But despite how much it sucked, he did enjoy the chance to get up every once in a while. That, and he’d been a cop long enough that he never left his door unlocked. Especially when he didn’t stand a snowballs chance in hell in defending himself if someone did try to bust in.
He eyed the liquor, his eyes shining. He’d have been perfectly happy with bottom of the barrel fare, but he wasn’t going to pass up on top shelf stuff. Especially not after getting shot in the gut. He’d read on the internet that whiskey was supposed to be gentle on the stomach, but higher quality stuff didn’t hurt.
“You’re a fucking Godsend, man,” Leon said. “Cups are above the sink.” He would have gotten them himself, but reaching that high hurt his shoulder and he only had one available hand. He made his way back to the couch and flopped down onto it.
“Yes, I am,” Dan agreed with a laugh. He made his way to the kitchen to retrieve the appropriate glasses for them to enjoy their whiskey properly. He took them back to the living room and set them down on the coffee table before opening the bottle. He poured Leon two fingers worth and handed him the glass. “This here be from my own personal collection. It not be the shite ye drink to get hammered, my friend,” he said as he handed Leon his glass. “This is the stuff ye drink to enjoy. I figured after alla the stuff ye been through, you could use a little bit o’ this.”
Dan poured himself a similar glass and settled in a chair. “Now, then,” he said, “Ye got me for the next couple o’ hours. What can I do take yer mind offa this--” he motioned towards the couch, “--fer a bit?”
Leon typically wasn’t used to drinking just to enjoy the flavour. As far as he was concerned, alcohol was meant to get you drunk. But it would be bad form to throw back the drink after Dan had gone through all the trouble of talking it up, especially since it was from his own collection. Leon swirled the glass once, then took a sip. “That’s good,” he said, a little surprised.
“You could get me out of this damn apartment,” Leon grumbled, more for his own benefit than Dan’s. “Or I guess just tell me about what’s going on with you lately. What’s been going on in the real world lately?”
Dan sipped his drink and raised a brow. “I could prolly take ya on a little excursion,” he said. “But we wouldn’t be able to take the whiskey with us and ye might take exception to me havin’ to carry ye down the stairs.” He was teasing.
“What’s been goin’ on with me, eh?” Dan swirled the whiskey in his glass thoughtfully. “Well, Liv and I moved in together. Into her apartment I mean. I wouldn’t want her having to stay in a dive like my old place. I was pretty nervous at first, Between you and me, I’ve never actually lived with someone before. Never had a serious enough relationship for it. We’re still getting used to it, learning each other’s little eccentricities and what have you.” Eccentricities other than eating brains, that is. “But we’re both happy. It’s funny, y’know. I never I’d fall in love and move in with anyone. Never thought someone like me was right for it.” Dan looked up and laughed. “Aye, but ye don’t wanna hear any o’ that sappy shite, d’ye, Leon? Let me think. What else can I tell you about? Oh, there was this daffy bastard in the bar yesterday evening…”
Dan proceeded to talk about the man who had come into his bar the previous evening looking as though he’d come straight out of the 60’s. A hold-over hippie, Dan had assumed and was soon proven right given the lingo the man used when he talked about how “The Man” was keeping him down. He’d been a right specticle for Dan’s usual patrons.
He also told Leon a few of the stories his patrons had told him over the last few days. As a bartender, Dan got to hear a lot of stories from those who had a lot on their minds and no one else really to confide in. Dan didn’t use names, there was an unspoken understanding of confidentiality between a bartender and his customer, after all. But some of the stories still made Dan scratch his head and wonder.
What he did not talk about was his Dreams and they had come to a rather chilling ending that somehow, despite his being dead, he’d been privy to. It didn’t seem appropriate given the circumstances.
Leon listened, occasionally laughing boisterously, though he tried to keep that to a minimum because every time he had a good belly laugh, it sent pain stabbing from the bullet wounds in his stomach.
But when the stories were over, Leon had to sit and chew on his thoughts for a moment, wanting to revisit something Dan had said before. “So, you and Liv, huh?” he asked. “You having fun so far?” and then, without waiting for an answer, he blurted out, “I asked Alex to move in.”
It hadn’t seemed impulsive at the time. It seemed smart. Alex was the only reason Leon had survived his dreams; if he hadn’t been there, Chris would have found a bloody corpse instead of his brother in the morning. But now, with more time to think about it - nothing but time to think about it - he wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. Leon wasn’t the easiest person to live with. He was grouchy and a complete slob, and even if Alex already spent most of his nights over, actually living with someone was a whole different ball game.
Dan raised a brow. “Ye did, eh?” He asked. “Well good fer you. I think that’s a good idea.” For one Leon Dreamed of some pretty weird shit -- and Dan knew what it was like to Dream weird shit. And violent shit. He was fortunate enough to not have any man-eating rabbits in his Dreams or an enemy that seemed to delight in taunting him at every turn, but he knew what it was like to wake up with an injury or two that carried over from the Dreams. He knew all too well how frightening it was waking up covered in his own blood and choking on his last breaths. He couldn’t imagine what Carolina had gone through finding his body, or what it must have been like for Liv seeing him laid out on a coroner's slab. He didn’t want anything like that to happen to Leon.
Plus -- and this was just as important -- Alex seemed good for Leon. As far as Dan could tell, Alex made Leon happy -- or happi-er, at least -- and that was important for someone in Leon’s line of work. It was something Dan hadn’t been able to do when he’d been a detective. It hadn’t been something even his father had been able to do.
Dan realized he was looking a little too long at his glass. He blinked and looked back up at the man he was supposed to be keeping company. “What did he say?”
Leon relaxed a little when Dan said it seemed like a good idea. His gut had said it was the right thing to do, but his gut had been all messed up lately with everything that had followed the dream shooting, and not just in a physical way. But he knew if he’d talked to Logan about this, Logan would be opposed to the idea. It didn’t seem like Alex could do anything without Logan getting bent out of shape about it.
“He said yes. We’re moving his stuff in at the beginning of the month. How’s things going with the Liv move? She driving you nuts yet?”
Dan smiled. “I’m glad to hear.” He chuckled a little. “Aye, Liv an’ I are fine.” He paused a moment. “We, uh, did have a minor little....thing happen a few weeks ago.” He admitted. “Skydiving accident. We’re both alright. She’s alright, but those visions.” Dan shook his head. “There don’t seem to be much of a rhyme or reason to them. They just kinda happen. They’re important to her, and I understand why, but--” Dan shuddered. “--I don’t want to go through something like that again.”
“A skydiving accident?” Leon asked. There were a lot of questions that that raised. First among them being why would anyone willingly fling themselves out of a plane. Second of all, how everyone could be fine after a skydiving accident. The second question was answered nearly immediately in his mind - he’d seen Liv get shot, and had seen her heal immediately after.
“I take it was the weird zombie healing thing she’s going going on?” He shook his head. No zombie story he’d ever watched had involved self-healing zombies. Hell, their whole thing was that they just got more and more wrecked until their limbs were barely holding on. “Liv tell you about her… brain tubes?” That name still made his stomach churn.
Dan nodded the affirmative to Leon’s first question. He could still see Liv’s body smashed against the ground and hear the crunch of her bones when she’d gotten up again. It still chilled him deeply. He downed what was left in his glass quickly.
“Aye,” he said when he came up for air. “She told me about’em. Right after the debacle at the jewelry store. She offered to just survive off’em so something like that wouldn’t happen again. But somethin’ about it just didn’t seem right. She wouldn’t go through the personality changes if she ate those, but she wouldn’t have the visions anymore either. She needs those visions, Leon. They help her deal with what the Dreams have done to her. I couldn’t take that away.” He reached for the bottle again. “Though we won’t be goin’ skydiving again any time soon. That’s fer sure.”
“Hey, I thought you said this stuff was for sipping,” Leon teased as Dan finished his drink, though Leon couldn’t say that he could blame him after seeing something like that.
“Yeah, I felt the same,” Leon grumbled. Something just didn’t seem right about Liv not being able to help him on his cases, even if it meant that she was going to be doing something idiotic like forcing him to take a million selfies with her. “Though I don’t know why anyone would go jumping out of a plane, with or without crazy person brains.”
Dan laughed. “Aye, it is crazy. But, believe it or not, I do shit like that all the time. I’m kinda an adrenaline junkie.” Kind of being something of an understatement. “I’d say years on the force made me that way, but I was takin’ risks long before I decided to become a cop. I get a little itchy when I’m idle fer too long. Night after night standin’ behind a bar can wear ona man, Leon.” Especially since now that was all Dan did with his time. No more high risk jobs that had the potential of getting caught or jailed or even killed. “Need somethin’ t’ get the heart pounding every now and again.”
Leon opened his mouth to say that Dan was probably more insane than Liv, but he closed it again. After all, Leon’s job really did get his blood pumping sometimes, and just sitting on this couch for the last few days had been nearly enough to drive him nuts. If he ever quit being a cop, he wasn’t really sure what he would do. He shifted in his seat to get more comfortable, grimacing a little as he moved. “Why’d you quit, anyway?” he asked.
Dan sighed and shook his head. “It’s a long story, Leon,” he said. “An’ not a pretty one. Though, ‘spose it never is, is it?” He took a sip from his glass. He’d retold the story countless times. To Ezio. To Liv. To Carolina. It never got any easier. “I told you me da was a cop. He’d been on the force for over twenty-years. Never wanted to be anything more than a beat cop. Loved his route. Cared about the people in the city. Just wanted to protect’em. He got run down while walking his beat. Hit an’ run. One of the store owners was outside when it happened. He saw the car, even wrote down the license plate. Shoulda been easy to track down the person responsible.”
Another longer sip of his drink. “I don’t need t’ tell you about corruption, Leon. Sure ye’ve heard it all before, but Da’s precinct -- it was up to its eyeballs in shite. The car belonged to a mob boss’s son and even though that bastard was all the way in Chicago, he had a long, long reach. The witness who took down the number. No statement was ever take from’im and one day he was just gone. Shop closed up tight. Never did figure out what happened to him.”
Dan looked up from his glass. “I pushed. I pushed so hard for something, anything to be done. But I may as well have been bashing me head against a wall. I was told to let it go. The Cheif o’ D’s himself even visited me personally. Tol’ me how much he respected me da, and out of that respect, he was givin’ me fair warning leave off. He didn’t want to see my career go up in smoke.”
Dan’s glass was empty again. “Course I couldn’t leave it be. I kept pushing. I got shut out. Me brothers in blue, the folks I thought I could trust, turned against me. I was the entire department’s pariah. They shoved me in the basement as far away from everyone as they could put me. Eventually, I didn’t have any choice.”
“Shit,” Leon swore. He finished his own drink and grabbed the bottle, wordlessly offering to top off Dan’s drink before he filled his own again. “Connections or not, there’s no way they should have let a cop killer go free.” Frankly, connections or not, Leon didn’t think any criminals should ever go, but he knew that they did and there wasn’t much of anything he could do about it.
In his dreams, his own boss had tried to get Leon to shut the D investigation down, and wouldn’t let Leon use any actual police resources on his investigation, but at least when Leon kept pushing his coworkers just considered him obsessed and gave him strange looks instead of actually shutting him out. “I’m sorry man. I take it they never got the guy?”
Dan held his glass out for Leon to refill. “Nah, they never did. The asshole ended up drunk and drowning in his father’s pool a coupla years later.” Of course Dan didn’t include that he’d helped Pedro Montoya drown in his father’s pool. Unlike Liv and Carolina, Leon didn’t need to know that extra detail. “After I left the PD, I drifted fer a bit doin the odd job here and there to get by. Eventually I ran into a guy looking to get rid of a bar and the rest is history.”
“Good, though it’s too bad you couldn’t get him behind bars,” Leon said, trying not to be too pleased at the news of Montoya’s untimely demise. It wasn’t often he took any satisfaction in the death of another human being, but, well, Montoya sounded as though he deserved it.
“But hey, you’ve done okay for yourself. There’s worse careers out there than working a bar.”
“Aye,” Dan said thoughtfully, though it was unclear if he was agreeing with Leon about it being a shame Pedro had never spent a single day in jail, or if there were worse things to be than a bartender. He was quiet a moment before saying just as thoughtfully. “Aye, suppose there are worse things I could be.”
He set his glass down. “That’s enough said ‘bout that,” he declared as he got to his feet. “Now that we’ve had ourselves a bit o’ drink, let’s see what we kin do ‘bout getting’ you outta here for a bit. I seem to recall you wanting to go to the beach.”
Leon’s face brightened nearly instantly at the mention of the beach, and the notion of getting out of the damn apartment. He’d heard of cabin fever but had never experienced it until now, and he would’ve given his left kidney for the chance to get out. “Damn rights I do,” Leon said. “I’ll get my trunks.”