"Has anything weird ever happened to you because of your dreams?" Who: Leon Orcot and Sharon Carter When: Sometime Before the Body Swap Plot Where: Hamburger joint What: Lunch Rating/Warnings: Low/None (some swearing) Status: Complete
If Leon ever saw some teenaged pimply brat taking a video of him doing his job again, he was going to take the damn smartphone out of the kids hand and smash it on the ground, consquences be damned. If it wasn’t bad enough that people on the streets recognized him and the guys on the force kept talking about his stupid nostrils, he had even had Chris come home from school saying that one of the kids at school had shown him the video on his smartphone (why did an eight year old have a cellphone in the first place? Leon hadn’t gotten one until he was 18), and was going on about how cool it was to see Leon chasing around a criminal.
Which, okay, that was kind of nice. But he hadn’t even been the one to bring the bitch down. He was in a worse mood than usual when he went to meet Sharon for lunch at a small little restaurant near her apartment that had some of the best burgers in Irvine, though he was still looking forward to seeing his friend.
Burgers were a godsend. Viv was with her Daddies, so Sharon had three whole hours free. It was amazing. She got to be a grown up, have a milkshake and dip her fries, and make a mess out of a delicious, sloppy burger. When Leon suggested this place, she jumped on the chance to get over here.
She even dressed up a little. Clad in clean jeans she hadn't worn since her first trimester, a stain free blouse and cute boots, she entered the restaurant and scanned for her friend. Her hair was clean and styled, and she was wearing make up for the first time in ages. She was starting to feel more like Sharon again.
"Hey," she slipped into the seat across from him. "How're you?"
Leon let out a wolf-whistle when he saw Sharon, though he waited until she was closer to the table to say “Wow, Mama. You’re looking great.” The scowl returned to his face when she asked how he was though. “Have I ever told you how much I hate the internet?” he said as his answer. “How’s things going with you?”
Sharon couldn’t help the little laugh and blush that came after the wolf whistle. She waved a hand at him, as if brushing off his compliment, but it really touched her. She was glad she was getting back to normal. “Thank you,” she added, realizing she should probably be a little more gracious. “The internet? Oh… that youtube thing?” She hadn’t even watched the whole video. Viv spit-up on her part-way through, so she had to stop it and go clean up. “Things are good! I’m so looking forward to a burger. But… tell me more about this youtube sensation stuff.”
“Best burgers around,” Leon said, grinning. “They’ve got these delicious wild boar burgers.” It was the only place Leon of that sold them, but he was a pretty big fan. “I don’t even know why the damn video is so fucking popular. It’s not like it’s anything interesting. Just some girl blowing up a park, me chasing her, and then some other cop taking her down.” And a close up of Leon’s scowling face, complete with his nose flaring.
Sharon hadn’t tried the wild boar. So maybe today was the day to get adventurous. She grinned over her menu at him, enjoying how uncomfortable the whole thing made him. (Okay, maybe she was a little evil. Sometimes.) “I dunno. I saw part of it, but then Viv needed… I don’t know. Diaper change or spit-up cleaning or something. This is my life lately. I can’t even get through a whole episode of Orange is the new Black without someone bursting into tears. And it’s not always Viv.” She reached for her water to sip. “But you apprehended the suspect, right? Maybe that’s why it’s popular. Finally, a cop doing the right thing.”
Leon had tried to watch Orange is the New Black. Hot lesbians? Totally up Leon’s alley. But he just couldn’t get behind the show and didn’t watch past the first couple of episodes. “If it makes you feel better, I can’t get through an episode of Orange is the New Black without snoring.” At her saying that maybe it was because of a cop doing the right thing, Leon smiled and sat up a little straighter. “Really? You think that might be it?” People hated cops, and Leon wasn’t blind to that. “It wasn’t even me who took her down though. It was Silverman from the CMPD.” He wasn’t sure if Sharon knew Silverman, but Leon had had a couple drinks with him way back when. The guy wasn’t very bright, and was obviously going to be stuck as a beat cop for a while, but he was okay… ish.
Sharon gave a little laugh. “Yeah, I get that. I’m powering through, though. My mom and dad like it, so.” She shrugged. Honestly, she’d only seen the first season, and while she thought it was fine, she wasn’t obsessed. Still, it was a valid point. Someone usually ended up in tears. “Maybe. I don’t know, I didn’t see the whole video.” She snorted. “Oh man, that sounds frustrating. Didn’t even take down the perp, and you’re getting all this youtube attention?”
“It’s awful. I mean, I don’t want this kind of attention in general, but to get it for nothing is kind of bullshit.” Really, all Leon wanted was to fight crime by day and live as an average joe by night. Now he was dreaming of strange Chinese shopkeepers that he was starting to suspect weren’t human, and talking to animals he didn’t realize were animals when he was drunk, and… He hadn’t told Sharon about that. Should he? He was still really suspicious of that whole Agency thing, and what kind of notes they were keeping on the people who stumbled into whatever the hell experiment they were running, but Sharon was his friend and he had always trusted her before.
The waitress came then, greeted Leon by name, and then took his order for a coke and a boar burger.
“At least the attention span of the average internet denizen is short. Hey, Shar. Has anything weird ever happened to you because of your dreams?”
Sharon just ordered the same. Whatever Leon was having, she’d have that, too. And fries. Lots of fries. She leaned back a little, watching his face as he went on. “Yeah, your fifteen seconds are almost up. Soon some politician will do something stupid, or an actress will show off her hoo hoo and you’ll be free and clear.” She paused for a beat. “What do you mean… weird?”
“You know like… doing things you hadn’t been able to do before.” Things that probably shouldn’t’ve been possible, and that weirded him out to the nth degree.
Sharon raised an eyebrow at that. “...things I hadn’t been able to do before? Like… yoga?” She asked. Of course, some of the skills she’d accumulated in the Dreams had bled through. She was a better shot now, stronger, faster, with better hand to hand combat skills. But that she wrote off as having practiced in the Dreams. That’s where those skills came from… right?
“Yeah, like yoga,” Leon agreed. “Or, say, suddenly knowing how to paint. Or talking to animals when you’re drunk. You know, things like that.” Good job, Leon. Real casual like.
Sharon coughed on a sip of water, eyes going wide. “...talking to animals?” She asked for clarification, once her breathing tube was free of h20. “You can talk to animals?”
“Not like all the time,” Leon said, feeling a little embarrassed. “There was this man at the bar a while back who I shared a pizza with until Revy came up and told me he was a rat. And, well, he was a literal rat.”
Sharon lowered the water glass to the table, staying at Leon to try and decide if he was kidding. Sure, there were strange things in her dream world, and she'd heard of some of them bleeding through--Tony Stark's suit, for instance. But talking to animals? There was that girl who claimed she could talk to squirrels... It wasn't that unbelievable, was it?
"You thought you were eating with a human being and it turned out to be a rat?" She asked. "Is there something wrong with your vision?"
Oh God, Sharon was staring at him. It was kind of weird being on the other side of someone's 'i don't entirely believe you' stare. It was usually him who denied weird shit like people talking to animals tooth and nail.
"No, he looked like a fucking human," Leon snapped. "Big ears and giant buck teeth and ugly as sin, but he looked like a person." This was probably the wrong way to do this. He took a sip of his Coke, took a breath, and in a less angry tone continued. "There are rumours around D's shop that sometimes he'll sell people these special 'pets.' People, really. I've never seen any of them," except for all the very cute girls who'd been crawling all over him when he got drunk one night and went to crash on D's couch instead of his own apartment, "but I just assumed that he was involved in slave trading and it was something else to add to his rap sheet." He dropped his voice to a conspiratory whisper, "But what if somehow he makes it so people can see the animals."
"You think he has some way of... enchanting people so they can see animals as humans?" Sharon asked. That was out of the realm of her dreams, for sure. Superheroes were one thing... talking animals was another. Anthropomorphic animals? That was something else entirely.
But that didn't mean she didn't believe him. She had never known Leon to make shit like this up. She picked up her own soda. "Or do you think he was doing something to the animals themselves?"
"I don't know, maybe," Leon shrugged. "I mean, in my dreams I guess I know that he talks to animals himself, but I still don't buy a lot of it. Living here had kind of...changed my perception on things." Entirely against his own will. He missed when vampires were still just scary stories. "But no, D wouldn't do anything to the animals. He wouldn't hurt a fly. And I mean that literally. He's still a murdering scumbag, I know that much, but he'd never harm something that wasn't human."
Sharon nodded. She sort of knew first hand about how living here changed his mind. She was about to respond when the server brought out a couple of bison burgers and set them on the table in front of each of them. Then a huge basket of fries. Sharon reached forward to start dressing up her burger. Ketchup, mustard, relish, mayo, tomato, lettuce, onion… the whole nine yards. When she was finished, she wasn’t going to be able to wrap her whole mouth around the thing. Juice from the tomato and the burger patty was going to get everywhere. That first bite was going to be glorious.
“Tell me more about this D character,” she said while she dressed the burger. “He’s a murderer, a criminal, yet you talk so fondly about him.”
Leon choked on the burger he had just crammed into his mouth, but he managed to recover after a coughing fit and punching himself in the chest a couple of times. “Fondly? You think I talk fondly about the guy? No way, José. He a slimy freak and when I finally dream about throwing him behind bars it will be the best damn dream I've ever had.” He’d been investigating him for a little under a year and a half in his dreams so far and wasn’t much closer to his goal than when he started (possibly further behind if someone considered the fact that Chris was living with D now instead of with Leon, but Leon was still sure he had planted Chris there like a mole in order to sniff out all of D’s secrets. He hadn’t come up with anything yet, but someday, maybe. In the meantime, Chris enjoyed living in the petshop with all his furry friends and D really did take better care of him than Leon could ever hope to), but he was nothing if not stubborn. To think Sharon would think that he spoke fondly of D. “Pfft, fondly. You’re clearly delusional. What kind of stuff do you wanna know? I’ll tell you what I can.”
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean to … hit a nerve.” Sharon said, raising an eyebrow. She wasn’t sure what to think about Leon and this guy he goes to movies with. Or the ballet, or whatever. She couldn’t remember. Besides the last few months had been a blur of pregnancy hormones and newborn sleep deprivation and the like. Maybe she was remembering incorrectly.
“Well, I dunno. He seems to be such an important character in your dreams.” She said. “What did he do?”
“It’s bad enough with Revy going on about how fond I am of D, I don’t need you to start too,” Leon frowned. He sighed, and thought about it. “Well, I was first brought into his shop because of the death of Robin Hendrix. He was some old sci-fi actor. Had one real famous role, and then didn’t get much. D had sold him this lizard that we found with the body, though no one could identify what kind of lizard it was. I went into D’s shop and he fed me this story about how the lizard was known as a basilisk, like Medusa, how Hendrix had first thought the lizard was a woman, but then realized his mistake and took the damn thing home. I started digging a little deeper, and found a series of mysterious deaths of people being torn apart by these animals, and they all had one thing in common. They bought them from D’s shop.
“I kept an eye on him after that. His pets kept coming up on our radar - a man whose bride had jumped overboard on her wedding night who bought a huge fish that he thought was her as a mermaid, those goddamn man-eating bunnies. Shit like that. I also suspect that he’s involved with sla-” No, wait, maybe not slave trading. He’d literally just said that he thought he might be wrong on that. “And drug tra-” Leon frowned deeply. He had jumped to drugs because he couldn’t think of any other reason why someone would think a lizard or a giant fish thing was a woman, but, well… “Anyway. He sells animals that kill people and he does it intentionally. And then he just fucking charms the pants off of everyone so they all think I’m weirdly obsessed with the guy for no reason when he’s clearly a psychopath.”
Sharon was about to apologize. She’d had no idea how much this would… irritate? Offend? Bother Leon. She wouldn’t have brought it up at all, but … well, he brought it up. The talking to animals thing. And she was simply following his lead. He had a lot of shit going on in those dreams. She hoped she could be an ear for him, should he ever need it. And now he seemed to be getting some of this shit off his chest. It was a good thing, she thought. She would listen for however long he needed or wanted her to.
“Wow. He sounds like… some kind of supernatural villain. Straight out of a science fiction story or a superhero movie.” Heh. “But you’re hot on his trail, though? So you’ll get him in the long run.” She was confident. Or, trying to be. Between huge bites of bison burger.
“Yeah, he uh…” Somehow, the word ‘villian’ didn’t quite seem to fit D, though Leon couldn’t explain why it didn’t. And villian logically seemed like it would be a good word to describe him, so Leon left it alone. “Even in my dreams, I’m starting to wonder if he’s not a normal human being. Apart from the whole talking to animals thing, I mean. It’s strange. But yeah, hot on his trail.” Or, at least, kind of close to to his trail. He wasn’t allowed to meddle in Chinatown affairs, the LAPD just kind of avoided the whole area no matter how much of a fuss Leon kicked up over it. It was one of the reasons the Chief was always telling him to lay off of D’s pet shop.
Sharon nodded. “Well, I know there are… supernatural people in my dreams. Supernatural humans, aliens… that kind of thing. We’ve even got a God.” She admitted. Of course, she’d never met The Avengers personally… not really… but she knew Steve Rogers. Pretty well, actually. And she’d seen pictures of Thor, of Bruce Banner, the Hulk, of Tony Stark… though, there wasn’t anything super human about him. Except the suit.
“The man that I’ve been assigned to in my Dreams? Steve Rogers? He’s… super. It’s actually a long story.” Sharon decided against going into the details. This conversation was about his dreams, not hers. “I imagine people might not take you seriously if you said he was supernatural...would they?”
“A God? No shit,” Leon said. It still kind of weirded him out that Sharon dreamed about Captain America, and he mostly okay without hearing about the super serum or Steve Rogers fighting Nazis with Wolverine or whatever she dreamed about. The less he thought about it, the less it hurt his brain. “I think they’d probably think I was insane,” he said, grinning a little. “I mean, they already think that I’m being unreasonable in regards to D in the first place, if I mentioned that he might not be human, they’d probably send me for a psyche eval or something. Hell, I’m half convinced in my dreams that I’m crazy for even thinking it.”
From an outside perspective, it seemed kind of obvious now, and he was a little embarrassed that he hadn’t figured it out earlier.
“Yeah.” Sharon said, nodding. Her mouth was practically full of burger and french fries as they talked. She had to keep lifting a hand to cover it so she wouldn’t accidentally spray food across the table while they spoke. So very ladylike, this one.
“Probably,” she agreed. “Unless there’s other supernatural-y stuff in the Dreams. Maybe stuff you don’t know about, but stuff other people do?” There had been weirder things, man.
“I guess that’s possible. I wouldn’t know,” and then he laughed because he was obviously hilarious. He really hadn’t heard of anything else, though he was pretty certain that vampires existed in his dreams. He had almost been convinced in the dreams, and that had been long before he had even considered the possibility of there being supernatural beings, though he had talked himself out of it. “There’s probably vampires,” he admitted.
It was obviously insane. The whole thing. Sharon knew it, Leon knew it, Logan knew it, and Veronica would tell you left and right that it was batshit crazy. Sharon was just glad her Dreams mostly left her alone. Not like some other people. She wasn’t a vampire or a giant fairy or anything.
“Vampires!” Sharon laughed. “I can just see you as Van Helsing.” She teased him.
“Oh yeah? Think I should trade in my gun and badge for a leather trenchcoat and a crossbow?” Leon asked, grinning a bit. “They don’t really play a big part in my dreams though, so I doubt that vampire hunting’s actually in my future. Far as I know they only showed up the one time.”
“They showed up once?” Sharon asked. “Well, nothing’s out of the realm of possibility if you’ve got vampires in your dreams.” It was only partially teasing. If there were vampires, there could be all kinds of things, couldn’t there? Who’s to say there can’t be werewolves or whatever? “I hope that you get down to the bottom of everything eventually. And figure out about this D person.”
“Yeah. I think she was hunting D for some reason,” Leon said, frowning. He still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, and he kind of wished that his dream self was a little more open to the possibilities of the supernatural. They’d probably have already caught D by now if that was the case.
Leon wasn’t always terribly self-aware, but it occurred to him that he had gone off about his dreams once again. He hadn’t meant to. He took a bite out of his burger. “Sorry. Anyway, the point is, I think I can talk to animals and that’s really fucking weird, right? What if someone from work sees me drunkenly chatting up a fucking pigeon or something?”
“It’s okay,” Sharon said, nodding once. She understood Dream stuff. it was always crazy. She bit again, too, though she’d been eating more than talking, and had nearly finished her food. “I don’t know,” she offered. “Does it happen a lot? Or was it just that one time?”
“Just the once,” Leon said slowly, and frowned to himself, putting down his burger so he could take a gulp of his Coke and cross his arms. “Actually, one time I went over to your place and I swore Veronica had guests but the only one there was her and Backup.” He’d almost forgotten about the incident, putting it off to the neighbours or the radio or something other than Backup.
“Wait, you heard Backup speaking? Like he was speaking English?” Sharon asked, brightening a little. She finished her food and wiped at her mouth with a napkin. “What did his voice sound like?”
“Yeah. I don’t know if it was for sure him, I only heard it through the door and he was barking just like any other dog when I got in there. He sounded kind of gruff I guess. Was yelling about me coming to the door.” Which seemed like a very dog-like thing to yell about. “I kind of wrote it off to being the TV or one of your neighbours at the time.”
“Well, that sounds like what a dog would yell about,” Sharon said, as if reading his mind. They must have had comparable mindsets to think something so similar. “And now? Now you know that it’s really Backup--that your dreams are affecting you? That things are bleeding through?--or do you still think it was the television?”
“No,” Leon said. “No, it was probably Backup.” He sighed. He really wasn’t sure what he was going to do if he was going to start having problems distinguishing people from animals. D never seemed to have a problem with it, maybe eventually Leon would be able to tell them apart too. And maybe it could come in handy. D had helped Leon solve a murder one time by talking to the vics pet fish; it would probably make Leon’s job a little easier if he could question people’s pets.
“How’s Viv been by the way?”
Sharon was impressed. She wished she could understand what animals were saying. But then he was asking about Viv, and she couldn’t help but beam with pride. “She’s amazing. She’s… I don’t even know. She’s happy all the time. All. The. Time. The world’s most beautiful and happy baby.” She gushed, then sipped her drink to make herself stop. “I sound ridiculous when I talk about her.”
“I think that’s a mom thing,” Leon said. “I’m not sure if it’s possible for them to talk about their kids without sounding ridiculous.” The way his own mother had gushed about him growing up had been downright embarrassing at times, though he looked back at it fondly. “It’s good she’s not too fussy though.”
Sharon grinned and nodded. “Probably. All the new moms I know act the same way when they talk about the babies. We all fall in love with our offspring. Good thing, too, because if we didn’t we’d probably give up on the next generation really early on. She set her napkin down on the table and stretched her arms up and over her head, leaning back a little as she stretched. “God, that was a good burger.”
He gave Sharon a fond smile. She really was going to be a great mom. She was already one. “Viv’s a lucky girl,” he said, cramming the last of his own burger in his mouth. “These are the best burgers in town.” Leon meant it too. Hamburgers were his favourite food in the world, and he’d taken his quest to find great burger joints seriously.
Sharon nodded again, more enthusiastically. “We’ll have to do this again sometime soon. Now Viv’s a bit bigger I can leave her alone for longer. We’ll have a standing burger date. Forget everything I said about trying to lose the baby weight.”