Leon Orcot (under_arrest) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2015-09-29 10:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, leon orcot, revy |
Who: Leon and Revy
What: Talking about Leon's day
When: This evening after Leon's partner and friend were killed
Where: The bar
Warnings/Ratings: Brief allusions to suicide and talk of people dying.
Status: Complete
Leon had had, to put it lightly, a rough day. He’d watched his partner get killed by his childhood friend, his first love really, and then watched that same friend take his own life. Once he’d managed to pull himself together, he had to go home to get changed into his own uniform to let Max’s wife know that he had been killed in duty. It hadn’t been easy, especially since she had seemed so concerned for Leon’s well-being, as if she didn’t blame him even though it was his fault.
It was, and he knew it. Max had counted on him to have his back, and Leon had froze when he had seen Harry there with the gun.
The first place he went when he got out of his uniform was the bar where he usually ran into Revy. He couldn’t really explain it, but he knew he didn’t want to go home yet. All he’d do there would be run over everything there, wishing to God that he could take Harry’s place. Things would be better, wouldn’t they, if he and Harry swapped places?
When he walked into the bar, a drunk stumbled into him, but Leon barely spared him a glance let alone yell at him to watch where he was going like he normally would. When he spied Revy sitting at the bar, he went and sat next to her, motioning at the barkeep to make him his usual - whiskey on the rocks. Without a word, he pulled out his smokes - he’d just bought them three hours ago and he was already down to a half a pack, fuck - and went to light it. His zippo was obviously empty, but he was nothing if not determined and he continued to try to get it to light.
It wasn’t the most unusual thing to run into Leon here. Sometimes it was an unspoken meet up, not coordinated via text or any sort of words, it was just sort of expected, and Revy had been fine with that. Technically she could just drink her damn life away in her shitty studio apartment and drop cheese into Steve’s cage, but she liked the ambiance of a less-reputable bar where shit happened.
The stool screeched against cheap linoleum and her eyes flickered - the molten brown, specks of gold - to a presence all too familiar. “Hey,” she greeted, voice the typical gravelly tone, and she slid him her lighter. “Your shit’s run out. You can bum.”
There was paperwork she was sifting through. Shit from work. It was fucking aggravating but it kept her busy for now.
“Thanks,” Leon muttered, finally lighting his smoke. He almost slipped it into his pocket out of habit, but caught himself last minute and placed it on the bar. He’d probably be using it again soon. His drank came shortly after, and he was content to sit quietly for moment, half watching Revy with whatever weird porn paperwork she was working on but mostly lost in his own thoughts.
After nursing his drink in his hand for a couple minutes, he knocked it all back in one swallow, focusing on the burn as it went down and the warmth in his stomach, and motioned for the bartender to fill it back up. A long drag on his cigarette, and a slow exhale. “I killed two people today,” he said after a moment.
Silence was alright with her. Shamelessly loud as fuck with a voice so screechy once heightened it could shatter glass, but she was the kind of person that didn’t mind sitting in the quiet. All the ruckus around them was background noise; the terrible song choice from the vintage jukebox, the cackling of leather-clad bikers in the corner, cigars protruding from their mouths and drinking from pitchers of beer.
Then what Leon said felt like the dropping of an anvil. Odd, considering she wasn’t a stranger to killing people, but the blonde fella next to her looking dim and grim probably wasn’t. It’d come in his career as a cop, eventually, wouldn’t it?
Tonight was the night.
Revy pinched the cigarette between her fingers, slowly exhaled the nicotine smoke, and turned to face him. “What happened?”
Leon attempted a sardonic smile. “There was a bank robbery this afternoon,” Leon said, working hard to keep his voice level. It might have sounded as though he was reading from a script, but it was the one way he knew to make sure that his emotions wouldn’t bleed through and make his voice crack or something. “My partner Max and I followed the man we thought was the ringleader out through a back alley. When he realized he was cornered he shot Max. Right in the head,” he tapped his forehead, as if Revy wouldn’t know where the head was located. “I could have stopped him, saved Max’s life, but when he turned around I,” here Leon’s voice did crack, and he cleared his throat, and took another drag of his cigarette. He composed himself before he spoke again. “I froze. I couldn’t pull the trigger.”
His next drink was put in front of him, though he emptied it almost as soon as it was placed in front of him. “The robber, it was Harry. My friend from high school.”
All Revy could do was listen. Listen, smoke her cigarette, motion drinks from the bartender that already knew their preferences. Straight rum for her, a repeat of Leon’s previous order, but she hadn’t touched hers yet. Paperwork was stuffed into the folder it came with to deal with later, since right now whatever clusterfuck Leon had gotten his sorry ass into had taken bizarre priority.
There was nothing left of her cigarette to smoke and fuck did she already crave another one. “The fucking odds of that,” she grumbled, fixing to pull another one from her crumpled up box. It had plenty for the night. The lighter was swiped, the fire flicked on, a couple puffpuffs and she was inhaling toxic back into her lungs. “Go on.”
“Probably about the same as Harry becoming a bank robber in the first place,” Leon muttered. “He always had a good head on his shoulder. Knew right from wrong. Hell, he was my moral compass for most of our friendship.” Leon had come up with a lot of stupid-joke stunts when he was in high school, and Harry had managed to talk him out of most of them. “I never thought he’d be…” He took another drag of his cigarette. It was amazing how a little stick of tar could help sooth his nerves so much.
“I had the son of a bitch in my sights, and I couldn’t pull the fucking trigger. A good man died tonight because I got cold feet. I couldn’t shoot someone that I…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Revy, I shouldn’t’ve sprung this on you. You probably don’t want to hear about this shit.”
Revy refrained from rolling her eyes. “Apologizing for shit like that is for pussies, Leon,” she mumbled around her cancer stick, the poison smoke more like a comforting blanket enveloping them. Ashes were flicked into the tray and she finally mustered the energy to lift her drink and knock it back, but there was no burn. It felt more like a gulp of water; signs of a seasoned drinker with a liver that was probably barely functional at this rate.
“Have you killed, before?” She didn’t know what his track record was like when it came to that. If he’d shot just to injure, or if he actually killed someone. Taking the lights from someone’s eyes was supposed to be a traumatizing event for good people but it was something she’d do in a heartbeat for shallow reasons. Money, mostly, or if someone really rattled her and was asking for a bullet in his fucking brain.
Leon actually managed to crack a smile at that, albeit a weak and very short-lived smile. Maybe he was a bit of a pussy, given that he allowed his partner to die, but talking to Revy about it kind of helped. At least she wasn’t mincing her words and tiptoeing around him, offering niceties and sympathies and telling him how it wasn’t his fault.
“No,” he said. “I’ve opened fire on suspects before, but I’ve never had to shoot to kill,” he said. “Maybe I’m not cut out for this. Maybe I should get a job… I don’t fucking know, as an accountant or something.” A job where he wouldn’t be forced to kill.
“If you don’t want to kill a person, then police work isn’t for you,” she said, both casual and blunt, nothing sugarcoated because that wasn’t her style - and Leon knew that. It was the harsh reality of how shit worked in this world, and Revy was far too jaded by it. “Some people aren’t meant to be killers, Leon. And that says a fuckton of good things about you.”
It was true. Never in a million years would she ever justify what she’d done; the lives she’d taken for the sake of the job and a paycheck at the end of the day. Taking lives ate away at you, and maybe there was hope for someone who was haunted by every person they killed, but in her opinion - she was lost. Everyone she killed was another line on her tally sheet.
She leaned back, thunderthighs crossed, elbow propped on the back of the stool. “Shit happens, and this is only the beginning. You’re one pretentious son of a bitch, but.” A pause to exhale, smoke furling. “You’re one of the better ones out in the field. You ooze good as fuck attentions, but shit’s gonna happen. Shit like this more often than you’d like, and you gotta figure out if it’s worth living with it.”
Leon sighed. He’d always known that if it came to saving Jack the Ripper or watching him die, he’d save Jack the Ripper without hesitation. And then slap a pair of cuffs on him and send him away for life, but he’d still save him. But he’d always thought that if it came to killing Jack the Ripper in order to save little Suzie Lou, then he’d also do it without hesitation.
Then again, Harry wasn’t exactly Jack the Ripper. Harry was the kid who had chugged a bottle of Vanilla Coke on a dare in freshman year and vomited all over Leon’s shoes. Harry was the kid who had helpfully pointed out that if Leon actually burned a giant penis into the rival school’s football field, he’d probably get his ass kicked (either by the rival team or his cop father. Whoever found out first). He was the boy who had yelled at Leon when he had caught him smoking behind the school when he was sixteen.
It was incredibly hard for Leon to reconcile that with what he knew of criminals. Criminals made their choices. They decided that they were too good for the law, that they were better than the rest of the people out there who actually followed the law. All of them were dirtbags to varying degrees. Criminals deserved what came from their choices, whether it was getting a little roughed up by the police before being thrown in the slammer, or whether it was dying at the end of the gun they chose to live by.
“Neither of them deserved this,” Leon said, clenching his fist. He butted out his cigarette before he started smoking the filter, and offered Revy another smile. Still sad, not entirely reaching his eyes, but a little more steady than the last. It was heartening to think that at least Revy, for all her, well, Revyness, thought that he was one of the good guys. “Thanks. For listening. I guess I’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”
Life ain’t black and white, as much as people wish it was. Maybe dividing things and people into two extremes of the spectrum made it easier to deal with, but criminals were still people (who made shitty decisions and sometimes were irredeemable scums, let’s be frank). Someone’s son, someone’s mother, a sister or uncle. Someone’s best friend, someone’s lover. It was a hard lesson that was bitchslapping Leon right in the face, and for once she didn’t have the heart to tauntingly say sucks to be you.
“Whatever happened to your buddy must’ve changed him,” she said, shoulders lightly shrugging. It was only an assumption. People weren’t born bad; they were molded by events and those who nurtured them, and sometimes opted to take down a darker path to keep their head above water. “Gotta realize that you’re gonna come across some shitty situations where it’s you or them and you got barely a second to make your damn mind. But don’t get fucking cheesy on me - you wanna blow this stand?”
Bars were too public to deal with shit like this sometimes. Leon probably needed to decompress elsewhere, and there was a rat in a tank by Revy’s bed that wanted to say hi.
“Yeah,” Leon said. What had happened to Harry? Leon would probably never know, not really. He wished he had been there more for his friend. If they hadn’t stopped writing to one another, or if they had been Facebook friends or something, maybe Harry could have asked to borrow money from Leon instead of robbing a goddamn bank. At her suggestion, Leon smiled a little bit. Of course she’d think his thanking her was fucking cheesy. He’d never really wanted to come out in public after the day he had. He’d just wanted to talk to someone, and Revy had been the first person who’d come to mind. “Getting out of here sounds like a great idea.”