Leon S. Kennedy (notarookie) wrote in pathways_log, @ 2021-11-17 15:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | psoh: leon orcot, resident evil: leon scott kennedy |
Who: Leon Orcot and Leon S. Kennedy
What: Both are stuck at the LVMPD
When: August 25 (the Great Freeze)
Where: The Las Vegas Metro Police Department
Ratings/Warnings: Mild Language; References to memory-related violence
Status: Complete!
Leon Kennedy was no stranger to cold weather. Hell, he grew up in Colorado and winters there could be pretty intense. But this was Las Vegas in the middle of August! One could chalk it up to freak weather, but two days had passed and the temperature wasn’t showing any signs of climbing. It was all hands on deck at the LVMPD to keep Law and Order in an otherwise chaotic time.
It was the end of his shift, and Kennedy was exhausted. He wasn’t questioning the snow anymore. In fact, all he wanted to do was go home, pour some whiskey in a cup of coffee and crash for the next nine hours. Only, there was a problem, a problem Kennedy hadn’t thought of until he’d gotten to his jeep.
It was buried in snow.
When he moved to Las Vegas, the last thing Kennedy had thought he’d need was to keep a shovel in his car. He was kicking himself for that assumption now as he used his hands to try to dig his car out of the drift. Nearly an hour later, he was finally behind the wheel, though he couldn’t feel his fingers anymore. His attempts to turn his engine over so he could at least get the heater on proved to be fruitless. Cold, wet and cranky, Kennedy made his way among the other buried vehicles in the parking lot and back inside the station.
Leon Orcot was a stranger to cold weather. He’d grown up in southern California, and he’d never had the chance or the inclination to leave it. He’d moved to Las Vegas, and while the temperature sometimes dropped below freezing, at least it never snowed.
The freezing temperatures were bad enough in the winter, but this was beyond freezing temperatures. This was subzero temperatures. This was the worst thing he’d ever had to deal with, weather wise. And as bad as the cold was, it was only made worse by the snow. The snow, and the ice, and everything else.
Orcot’s car hadn’t started since any of this had started, because of-fucking-course it didn’t. He’d had the same car since he was 16 and it had been old even then. It definitely didn’t have a block heater, and there was no point in replacing the battery until the weather warmed up enough that the next one wouldn’t instantly die too. He’d been forty-five minutes late the first day of this cold snap while he’d waited for a taxi to come pick him up, and had been cabbing it every day since. He hoped that the weather would abate soon; he didn’t think he could afford taking a cab to work every day.
He’d spent an hour after his shift in the precinct gym - he couldn’t run like he normally did before and after work, but he could at least do weights - and he’d been towelling off, on the phone with the cab company, when he saw Kennedy heading back inside the station. He glanced at the wall clock, wondering what was up, and then ordered his cab.
Ten minutes later, he was on the phone again. “What do you mean you can’t get a cab out here?” Orcot demanded. “What? You guys afraid of a little snow?” He scowled into the receiver. “No, you go fuck yourself,” he snapped churlishly, hung up the phone, and stalked into the staff room to help himself to some old coffee.
“Not a single fucking cab in the city will come get me,” Orcot complained at Kennedy when he saw him. “Can you believe that? Little snow and the whole damn city shuts down.”
“Yeah, I believe it,” Kennedy answered through chattering teeth. His shoulders were hunched up as he gripped a warm cup of coffee as though it was the warmest thing in the world. Given the amount of snow outside, it may as well have been. “My fucking Jeep was burried. I had to dig it out.” And his hands and fingers were bright pink to prove the point. “And once I finally got inside, it wouldn’t start! Dude, no one is traveling in this shit!”
Orcot frowned. “That’s a lot of bullshit,” he muttered. “Anyway, I thought this was supposed to be a desert. Why the hell are we getting like, ten feet of snow?” Maybe ten feet of snow was an exaggeration. Then again, maybe it wasn’t. He frowned, regarding Kennedy for a moment. “You look like a popsicle, man,” he said after a minute. “I think we’ve probably got a heat pack somewhere around here. Want me to say if I can scroung one up?”
“I don’t fucking know,” Kennedy grumbled. “I sure as hell didn’t think I’d have to bring tirechains and an emergency shovel to fucking Nevada” He shivered and gripped his mug closer to him. He looked up when Orcot offered to find a heat pack for him and then shook his head. “Better save it for an actual emergency,” he said. “We still got hot water in the showers?”
“Climate change is fucked,” Leon agreed. It was, after all, the only explanation. It made a twisted kind of sense that after an extraordinarily hot summer, the season would end with a snow storm. Not that Leon had ever studied any sort of climate science, or had gotten anything higher than a C in his high school science classes.
“We did fifteen minutes ago,” Leon nodded. “I can’t imagine that’s changed.”
Kennedy had watched a movie years ago about the Earth’s weather going crazy and storms and blizzards wreaked havoc on the Earth’s population. He didn’t like the idea that they may just be experiencing that in reality. He shivered again. “I’m gonna go take a shower,” he said. “Hopefully that’ll warm me up.”
He took the mug of coffee with him to the locker room, only setting it down long enough to strip out of his clothes. At least the department still had hot water and after a few minutes of standing in the shower with the hot water pouring over him, Kennedy could stop shivering and the pain in his fingers and hands subsided.
As he was toweling himself off, Kennedy caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. The mark on his shoulder was almost complete now. All it was missing was the star in the middle of the shield. The mark, the memories of being a rookie cop in Raccoon City and then a special agent on assignment in Spain, magic Easter egg bunnies, and now snow in the middle of August. Kennedy couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all related somehow. It had to be. Right?
After he got dressed, Kennedy rejoined Orcot at his desk. The other detective wasn’t the best person to talk to about Weird Stuff, but there wasn’t anyone else around who even saw the marks.
Orcot spent most of the time trying, in vain, to try to find a ride home. Public transit was down, he couldn’t get a taxi, and the one Uber he’d managed to hire wound up cancelling after getting stuck in the snow. It couldn’t be that bad, he told himself, but when actually went outside to check - after struggling to force the door open - what he saw left him cold, figuratively and literally. He couldn’t even see the cars in the parking lot for how thick the snow was falling.
Deciding, reluctantly, that even if he did manage to find a ride to brave the storm, it would be irresponsible to encourage them, he put on another pot of coffee and returned to his desk.
He looked up at Kennedy when he approached Orcot’s desk. “Even if your Jeep did run, I think you missed your opportunity to make it home,” he said, a little dejected. “Can’t see your fucking hand in front of your face out there.”
He was glad that he’d watered Gattolotto the night before. He hoped he’d be able to get home the next day, but if he couldn’t, she’d be fine for a few days without him. He wondered if plants got lonely.
Kennedy glanced towards the window and saw nothing but darkness and snow just beyond the glass. It made him feel uneasy -- anxious -- being stranded at the police station. This was supposed to be a safe place, but his memories of being trapped at the R.P.D. did nothing to bring him any comfort. He could take some solace in the fact that neither Orcot nor the other officers stuck there with them were zombies and Mr. X wasn’t hunting him down, looking to choke the life out of him.
“Great,” he muttered more to himself than to Orcot. He let out a weary breath before looking back at the other man. “I was thinking just now,” he said carefully, knowing full well the reaction he was about to get. But he couldn’t ignore the giant elephant in the room. “What if...what if this is, you know, related to the other weird things that have been going on the last six months.”
Orcot tensed, his jaw clenched. He still wasn’t over the shock of Qrow well… being a crow. He probably should have been over it - after all, he’d dealt with a lot of fucked up animal things that he couldn’t quite explain when he’d lived in LA, so it wasn’t like it was new.
But it was still fucking weird.
“You mean like the heat waves and other intense weather patterns?” Orcot said, less a question than a statement. He wanted a cigarette. “Yeah, probably. Global warming and all that. It’s not like I understand it, but I get it, I guess.”
Kennedy should have expected that as an answer. It wasn’t any different than Orcot’s other answers whenever Kennedy had tried to talk to him about the odd events that had been happening over the past few months. In a way, he understood Orcot’s refusal to acknowledge that something that defied logic was going on. To do so would admit that none of them had any sort of control. Though, Kennedy had long been wondering if they’d ever had control in the first place.
On the other hand, Kennedy was getting desperate to talk -- have an actual conversation with someone. He found himself wishing Claire was there, or even her brother Chris. He’d called Claire a couple of times since the memories had started. Had even dropped the name Raccoon City. Of course the name hadn’t meant anything to her. It was strange just how much that hurt.
He regarded Orcot before finally deciding to push the issue. “I don’t think this has anything to do with global warming,” he said finally.
“What? So you think it has to do with random hallucinated memories and invisible tattoos and shapeshifters and ‘other worlds’?” Orcot snapped, maybe little too savagely for it to have been a thought that only just now occurred to him.
“You tell me!” Kennedy snapped back at him, irritation crawling up the back of his throat. “First the tattoos, then the memories, then the eggs and bunnies and now this!” He gestured towards the window and the snow piling up outside. “You really think that all of it is just pure coincidence?! You’re a goddamn detective, Orcot. There are no coincidences!”
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any of these goddamn memories that people are going on about,” Orcot snapped. The bunnies and the eggs and the tattoos.... Well, there was no explaining that, really, and Leon scowled, settling back into his chair, arms crossed.
“So what do you think this is?” Orcot asked, gesturing toward the window. “Snow fairies? A magical wizard casting a spell? Frozen come to life?”
Kennedy gave him a flat look. “Really,” he said, crossing his arms in front of him. “So that whole thing about carnivorous rabbits, that was something that actually happened to you? It wasn’t a ‘hallucinated’ memory?” Yeah, like Kennedy was going to believe that.
However, when Orcot asked him what he thought was causing the snow, a lot of the irritated bluster left his sails. He cast another weary look at the windows. He didn’t have an answer, and that bothered him more than Orcot’s constant denial. “I don’t know...maybe?” Which did sound fucking rediculous, he couldn’t deny that. However, once you have memories planted in your mind about the goddamn zombie apocalypse, snow fairies or even the damn Snow Miser didn’t seem that far fetched.
Kennedy turned his attention back at Orcot, frowning seeing the look on the other detective’s face. “I don’t have an explanation, logical or otherwise. But I know that being in constant denial isn’t going to make it stop.”
“Yeah, the carnivorous rabbits actually happened,” Orcot snapped, and then added in a mutter, “It was a pretty big fucking deal too. Guess you don’t pay too much attention to California news out in Colorado or wherever.” Honestly, it was astounding to him how many people had never heard of the swarm of man-eating rabbits that had taken over LA. They’d threatened the entire continent. He’d have thought that it would have been heard of all over America, but since it had been contained within a couple of days, maybe the news hadn’t spread as far as Orcot expected.
He should have felt like he’d scored some sort of victory when Kennedy admitted that he couldn’t actually explain what had happened. He didn’t, though. He just felt uneasy.
Kennedy stared at Orcot in actual dumbfounded shock. What the fuck was he talking about?! “No, it didn’t.” He argued. “If there was a horde of man-eating rabbits attacking people, it’d have been all over the goddamn news. Not just in California, and probably not just in the U.S., either. Nevermind the fact that people’d probably treat rabbits a lot differently than they do.” He eyed Orcot carefully. “When, exactly, did this rabbit-attack happen?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Orcot said. “It was all over the news. If you missed it, it’s because you weren’t paying attention.” It wasn’t Orcot’s fault that Kennedy didn’t bother checking on the national news. “It happened first week of October, 1995,” he said, answering automatically. He wasn’t likely to ever forget the date of something like that.
It was only after he’d spoken the words that he paused, blinking. He’d been two months old in October, 1995.
Kennedy’s eyes narrowed in thought. He was starting to understand why Orcot was in such denial. Or at least, he thought he understood. He unfolded his arms before taking a seat across from Orcot. “That’s what you remember, right? But how could you when you were just a little kid? Seems kinda weird doesn’t it? I’ve got memories like that too, just switch out man-eating rabbits with zombies. Only those memories are from 1998. But that’s impossible. I was just a kid back in ‘98.”
“I wasn’t even a kid, man, I was like, two months old. Is that a toddler?” Orcot grumbled. And he’d met D months before then. He hadn’t even been born yet. He crossed his arms across his chest, brow furrowed
So maybe the man-eating rabbits hadn’t actually happened, but that didn’t mean the rest of it hadn’t, did it? D had been involved, but that didn’t put into question all his memories with D. Except now, when he tried to think of how things had resolved with D (I had to have arrested him, right? Orcot couldn’t remember. Had he arrested D, or was D still in LA, or had D left? Leon got a flash of an explosion, of gripping D’s hand with all his might as they leapt off a skyscraper together, but there was no context to that.
But then, where had Chris stayed when he came to live with Orcot for a year? Because that had definitely happened, he knew that with absolute certainty. But now that he thought about it, he seemed to recall only seeing Chris on the weekends sometimes, when Orcot could get away from work, of Chris staying at a boarding school for special needs kids, or something.
He barely even registered Kennedy mentioning zombies, but once the words clicked he blinked, his expression clearing.
“Zombies?” he asked, and then shook his head. “I need a goddamn cigarette,” he muttered, pulling open his desk draw to grab the pack of smokes there. “You want one?” he asked.
Kennedy had quit smoking cold turkey when he entered the academy and could proudly say he hadn’t had a cigarette in 8 years, however, at that moment he needed something to steady himself. And seeing how he was still at the department and getting a drink seemed less and less likely, he’d settle for a nicotine fix. He nodded his head. “Yeah, I could use one.
Orcot nodded, pushing away from his desk and headed out toward the parking lot, though as he passed Detective Miller’s desk, he slowed, and then took a quick glance around. There was no one else around at the moment, Miller was gone for the day, and Orcot thought he could be quick enough.
“Watch my six,” he murmured, and sat down in Miller’s chair, and began rifling through his papers and unlocked drawers for a paperclip or something else he could use as a lockpick.
“What are you…?” Kennedy started to ask, but It soon became clear exactly what Orcot was doing. The why was what was in question. He sighed and turned around to keep a lookout for anyone coming. “What are you looking for?” He asked over his shoulder. “I don’t think Miller smokes.”
“I got my own smokes,” Orcot said, twisting a paperclip into a lockpick. He had to unlock two drawers before he found what he was looking for, but when he did, he let out a triumphant, if not muted cry, and turned to Kennedy, holding up the bottle of vodka triumphantly. “I fucking knew it.”
It wasn’t that Orcot had ever actually seen Miller using the bottle, but he’d suspected that Miller spent his days at work just a little bit buzzed, and one afternoon last month, Leon had snuck a sip from his coffee when no one was around and confirmed it.
He didn’t bother making sure to put all of Miller’s things back in place when he stood up from Miller’s chair. After all, what was Miller going to do about it? Run to the captain and complain about someone stealing the vodka from his desk?
Kennedy didn’t know which was worse: Orcot breaking into another detective’s desk, or that said detective was hiding a bottle of vodka in his desk drawer. “What the hell?” He demanded in a hush tone. “What are you gonna do with that?” Though, Kennedy could make an educated guess and it wasn’t running to the chief to rat out their colleague. He sighed. “C’mone lets get outta here before someone catches us.”
Orcot slipped the bottle under his jacket, grinning toothily. “I’m not on duty, and you’re not on duty. Just because we’re stuck at the station doesn’t mean we have to be sober doing it.” It sure as hell made Orcot’s evening more bearable, at least. If he was going to have to sleep on one of those uncomfortable, stained couches in the breakroom, he didn’t want to have to do it sober.
Orcot led the way to the back doors and shoved them open. It took a surprising amount of effort, and he was more than a little dismayed to see how much snow had already built up against the building.
Kennedy couldn’t argue with Orcot’s logic and he didn’t want to argue with the logic either, so he followed the other detective towards the doors, coming to a stop when Orcot tried to force them open. He was just about to lean his shoulder into them as well when the other man finally got them open. A blast of cold air hit him in the face, causing his eyes to squint and his shoulders to hunch up towards his ears. At least he still had his jacket on, though he wished he’d thought of wearing actual winter gloves when he left his apartment that morning. The fingerless tactical gloves he’d taken to wearing weren’t going to cut it out there.
He was equally dismayed at the amount of snow outside as Orcot was. “No one’s driving in this tonight,” he muttered, his breath turning into steam around his face as he spoke. It was clear now that both he and Orcot (and everyone else at the station) were going to have bunk down for the night.
He glanced at the other detective and nodded to a little alcove off to the side where hopefully they’d have a reprieve from the wind and snow while they smoked.
Orcot tucked into the alcove, fishing out a couple of smokes. He handed one to Kennedy before he lit his own, and then took a swig from the vodka. It was cheap and harsh, but Leon managed to choke it down before handing off the bottle.
He frowned then, tucking his hands into his armpits, smoke clenched between his teeth. “This is fucked up,” he said after a moment. “How the hell is anyone supposed to know what’s real and what’s not?”
So much of his life, or what he thought was his life, had been wrapped up in D. Thinking about the idea that none of that had actually been real was enough to make him feel a little ill.
Kennedy took the offered cigarette and lit up himself. When Orcot handed him the bottle of vodka, he hesitated a moment before he took a pull off of that too. After handing the bottle back, he wrapped one arm around himself, burying his left hand between his bicep and chest. The other hand gripped the lit cigarette between bare fingers. The first drag made him cough, but he quickly got over it. He felt as though he should have cared more that he just puffed away 8 years of being smoke free, but he really didn’t.
His eyes were on the doors he and Orcot had come out of. Half expecting Detective Miller to come through them, or worse, the chief. But no one did. No one was stupid enough to come outside in a blizzard. Just the two Leons.
Kennedy looked at the other detective when the man spoke. “I don’t know,” he admitted after a moment. “I guess if you look at things logically --” which seemed like such a stupid thing to say with the two of them standing outside in a blizzard in the middle of August. So Kennedy shut his mouth and shook his head. He dragged on his cigarette before speaking again. “I don’t know,” he said again, his eyes moving back over the parking lot and eventually back to the double doors. “A part of me knew that Raccoon City didn’t actually exist. If we’d actually gone through the Night of the Living Dead there would have been some kind of lasting effect or something. Like, you know, ‘Remember Racoon City’, or something.” He frowned. “And if any of that shit was real, then I wouldn’t be here, either.”
“There’s no ‘logically’ about this,” Orcot grumbled. There wasn’t. If you looked at it logically, none of this should have been possible. Not the weird memories that Orcot would’ve sworn, up until a few minutes ago, were real. Not the heaps of snow that had fallen in the last several hours. None of it.
“I’d say the name should have tipped you off, but I guess Forks of Salmon is a thing.” He snorted. There really were some weird town names out there. He grew a little more serious as he thought over what Kennedy said, and he took another swig from the vodka bottle. The liquor burned all the way down, warming his stomach, and he between that and the cigarette, he felt a little less aggravated by all of this. “You remember something happening to you?” Orcot asked, passing back the bottle.
“I didn’t get eaten by a zombie,” he said, taking the bottle. “But I did get picked up by some government agents after I escaped. I had a kid with me…” Sherry. Kennedy trailed off, thinking about the little blond girl and the nightmare she had been through. It had been rough for Kennedy and Claire, yeah, but for Sherry...Kennedy believed what she had endured had to have been ten times worse. He took a pull from the bottle. “I had to protect her. Claire was already gone, so after we got picked up, the only way I could make sure Sherry was safe was to make a deal with the agents.”
A deal with the agents didn’t sound great, Leon had to admit, but he could understand it, he thought. He didn’t especially like kids, but when Chris had been staying with him, Leon would have done just about anything to make sure he was safe.
Except now he wasn’t sure what of that experience had been real, and what had been some fucked up parallel dimension or whatever it was that was going on.
“What kind of deal?” he asked, instead of dwelling on that particular question.
Kennedy frowned, his eyes still on the double doors. “If I went to work for them then they wouldn’t use Sherry as some kind of science experiment,” he said. “See, it was her dad who worked for Umbrella and is responsible for the outbreak. Then the genius decided to infect himself with the G-Virus. It turned him into a monster.” Kennedy took a breath, the image of mutated William Birken with the giant yellow eye bulging out from his shoulder, hulking and stalking them leapt forward in his mind. That gaping maw that tried to swallow them whole haunted him. He shook his head and took a drag. “I don’t know the whole story --” and there was a large part of him who was glad for that given the implications of what Birken had done to his own daughter, “ -- but Birken did something to Sherry after he mutated so the virus...I don’t know...lives inside her or something? Regardless, after everything she’d been through -- Her mother getting killed, her dad turning into a monster, I couldn’t let them just take her away like that. I wanted to keep her safe and the only bargaining chip I had was myself.”
“Shit,” Orcot swore. None of that at all sounded okay. He’d thought killer rabbits had been bad, but that was definitely worse than child experimentation and zombies. “You think they’re going to honour the deal?”
Orcot wondered, a little. For the most part, he trusted the government okay. He knew shady shit went on, but he didn’t think the government was usually out to get people. But the idea of them not studying some little girl who might hold some answers during a zombie outbreak just because some guy volunteered to work for them… Well, he wasn’t sure if he trusted that.
“They did,” Kennedy answered, which, he had to admit, surprised him too. “I don’t get to see Sherry much -- they got me going to all these places fighting B.O.W’s,” he frowned again thinking of Spain and the cluster fuck that had turned into. “But the guy who recruited me turned out to be one of the good ones and I trust him.” Which also surprised him given the circumstances under which he and Adam had met. “And Sherry is safe. That’s really all that matters.”
“B.O.W.s?” Orcot asked, trying to parse through the abbreviation. Biological something Weapons? “But that’s good. That she’s safe.” He’d mention that it also mattered that Kennedy was safe, except, well, they were cops. Orcot hadn’t taken this job because he expected it to be safe, and he doubted Kennedy had either. He suspected that the Kennedy that Kennedy remembered felt much different.
“Bio Organic Weapons,” Kennedy supplied. “Living weapons created by the G-Virus...or the T-Virus...or the C-Virus, or maybe even a parasite...” he shuddered and motioned for the bottle back. After taking a healthy pull, he handed it back over to Orcot. He took another drag off the cigarette as a blast of arrant cold air hit the two of them from around the corner. He shuddered again and hunched his shoulders up higher around his ears.
Orcot handed over the bottle, frowning. He shared Kennedy’s shiver, though it was hard to tell if it was because of the list of viruses Kennedy had just listed, or because of the biting wind that found them even in this closed off nook. He took another pull of the bottle himself, and sucked back the rest of his cigarette, tossing the butt on the ground.
“You wanna finish this bottle inside?” he asked, nodding toward the door. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to find somewhere private in the precinct, even if anyone who hadn’t already gone out on their beats were probably stuck here inside.
Kennedy glanced at the door and debated if drinking inside the department was better or worse than drinking outside. If the Cheif caught them, it could be their badges, or their asses, or both. Then again, he and Orcot were technically off the clock and it wasn’t either’s fault that they couldn’t actually leave. And it was warmer inside and they were less likely to get buried in snow. Aw, fuck it.
“Yeah,” Kennedy nodded. His cigarette was finished by now as well and he snuffed out the butt. “Let’s get back inside before we freeze to death.”