Joe Hardy hates this plan (ihateyourplan) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2016-10-25 15:56:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, joe hardy, leon orcot |
Who: Joe Hardy and Leon Orcot
What: Small talk over coffee takes a serious turn
When: Backdated to mid-Septemberish (after the Grounder Sickness Plot)
Where: Local coffee shop
Rating/Warnings Low/None
Status: Complete!
Doughnuts and coffee. It was practically an everyday routine nowadays. Leon himself didn’t often partake in doughnuts, but at some point he’d become one of the regular doughnut guys for the precinct. Not that he minded too much. While he’d originally been pretty chummy with most of his coworkers, the last few months had seen him separating himself from them. He wasn’t one of them anymore, even though he tried.
But by providing sugary treats, he was still able to stay on the good side of his coworkers. Make sure they still had his back when they were out in the field. He was just handed his tea and his large box of doughnuts when he noticed the man who’d worked on Stella for him once upon a time. “Hey,” he said, nodding toward the man. “Joe, right?”
Joe had become something of a regular at the coffee and doughnut shop. He hadn’t meant to be, the shop was conveniently located close enough to his apartment that he could stop in on his way to work in the morning, or stop there after his morning run and grab something to eat. Doughnuts were a little too sweet for him, but the bagels were pretty ok.
He recognized Leon, the owner of the classic Mustang pretty much right away. He gave him an easy smile and a nod. “Yeah,” he said, reaching out for a handshake. The backs of his knuckles still looked a bit rough, but were healing, so long as Joe didn’t rub them against something unfortunate in an engine block. “Good to see you, Leon. How’s Stella doing?”
Leon clasped his hand, though he frowned a little at the beat up looking knuckles. He opted not to mention anything though. Sometimes mechanics banged up their hands at work. Or maybe Joe had gotten himself into a fight. Either way, it wasn’t Leon’s business. “She’s running like a dream. As far as I’m concerned, you did alright by her.”
It hadn’t been a fight so much as a merciless beating on their old refrigerator. Joe’d had a bad day a week or so ago - waking up to find a bomb on your kitchen table will do that - and he’d taken out his frustrations on the fridge. Today he seemed to be doing much better, seeing a familiar face helped that a bit.
“I’m glad to hear,” he said letting go of Leon’s hand. “She’s a beautiful car.” He reached for his coffee and started doctoring it the way he liked it. He could never drink it straight black. “How’s the county treating you?”
When Leon had been drinking coffee on the regular, he’d always taken it black, but he hid the distaste for the stuff Joe was putting into it well. At least he didn’t drink it with more sugar than beverage, like D usually took his tea. Leon had switched to tea since his dreams, even if it never was as good as the stuff D made, though he still drank it black.
“Aside from my…” He still wasn’t exactly sure how to address Revy when he was talking about her. Girlfriend was not really a word that fit her, even if she technically was his. “My partner got that virus that was going around, but she ended up coming out of it okay.” And that felt vaguely like he was talking about Logan. He frowned to himself, then shook his head. Whatever he called her really wasn’t that important in the grand scheme of things. “What about you? Things been going alright?” He didn’t mean to glance at the knuckles, though his eyes still flicked there.
Joe frowned slightly. “Yeah, I caught that virus too,” he said. “Actually, my brother caught it first. It was friggin’ awful,” though that seemed to be the understatement of the goddamn year. Frank bleeding from the eyes, convulsing and throwing up blood had been worse than any nightmare Joe’d ever had. “And I guess I must have caught it from him? We both ended up in the hospital.” His brows furrowed a moment. Wasn’t the virus a Dreamers thing? Did this mean Leon and his partner were Dreamers too? Joe didn’t think he’d seen him on the Network, not that he had gone looking for him. Joe didn’t post much, but he kept a close eye on it as much as possible, either to get as much information about the Dreams as he could (and there wasn’t much, really) or to get a heads up on what could be coming down the pipe next.
He noticed Leon’s eyes look towards his knuckles and back again and glanced at his hands too. He chuckled, but it was an uneasy laugh. “Uh, yeah,” he cleared his throat, “we had a little, uh, mishap in our apartment a little while ago. Our fridge...kinda...blew up?” It wasn’t a lie, but Joe was uncertain what details he could give. He didn’t want to give a potential customer any reason to decide he was crazy and not come back to the garage.
“It looked awful.” He had never felt so helpless than watching the girl he loved felt strongly for barely strong enough to lift her own hand. “Lucky for me though, Orcot’s don’t get sick,” he said proudly. He’d been certain he’d catch it, especially after he didn’t leave Revy’s side until she was better.
Leon didn’t spend much time on the Network. Truth be told, he forgot about it sometimes. He’d even needed to be reminded to check it when Revy fell sick, which was probably for the best since otherwise they’d have a hospital bill to contend with. His rose an eyebrow at the fridge blowing up. “Your fridge blew up,” he deadpanned. “Someone dislike your snack choices, or was it just one of the many strange things that happens in the county?” Really, Leon had no idea how to bring up the dreams to someone without sounding insane, but that definitely sounded like something that could have happened just because someone took a nap around here.
Leon was a cop, so of course he’d be aware that weird things happened around here, just as the emergency crews that had arrived at the apartment seemed to have known. Or at least knew that Orange County had the potential to go sideways every now and then. Joe looked at Leon carefully wondering if maybe he knew a little more than he let on.
“Let’s say it was the latter of those two choices,” Joe stated carefully.
“Oh yeah? Take a nap and wake up with an exploding fridge?” Leon asked, raising a quizzical eyebrow. Leon had met enough dreamers that after a point in the conversation, it didn’t seem completely crazy to mention it. Of course, if he didn’t dream, Leon would have no choice but to take his car to a different mechanic because he would sound insane.
Joe raised a brow as well. Leon’s words were as good as an admission that he too was Dreaming, or at least was aware of the Dreams what they could do. He glanced around to be sure no one was paying them any more attention than they should be. “Something like that,” he answered in a low tone as he turned his attention back to Leon. “More like I went to bed and woke up the next morning with a bomb ticking on the kitchen table.”
Leon really was surprised at that. “You’re kidding. I can’t say I’ve ever had anything like that show up from mine. What exactly do you dream about?”
Was it alright to talk about these kinds of things right out in the open like this? Joe glanced around again. Again, no one seemed to be listening in on their conversation. “I’m a detective. The Dream the damn thing came from involved my car getting bombed.” Even if Joe wasn’t talking about some kind of vision of another life, the statement still sounded bizarre.
Leon had found that if you were in a public space, people were less likely to listen in on you if you appeared to just be having a normal conversation. Start looking shady, or talking in somewhere that was less crowded, and everyone would be trying to listen in, but two guys standing around with coffee and doughnuts wasn’t so weird. Though, finding out he was a detective in his dreams as well as their conversation of the family business when Leon had Stella fixed, he was wondering if there wasn’t some reason why he didn’t follow that path here.
“That’s rough. At least fridges are cheaper to replace than cars. Glad it didn’t end up worse.”
This was all still very new to Joe and maybe, just maybe. Frank’s talk of conspiracies and cover-ups was making him a little paranoid. For all Joe knew a member of this mysterious “Agency” was lurking in the coffee shop and that idea unnerved him.
However, the far more experienced Leon seemed to have the right idea. It certainly didn’t sem as though anyone was paying either the two men or their conversation any attention. In fact it was becoming obvious no one gave a shit about whatever they were talking about. That was something of a relief. “Yeah,” Joe agreed, having relaxed enough to give Leon his undivided attention. “It almost did end up worse. We were lucky no one got seriously hurt. Frank got whacked by the fridge’s door, but other then that…” he trailed and shook his head. “Yeah, I’m glad it didn’t turn out worse than it did.”
It was then a thought hit Joe. Leon was a detective too and obviously a Dreamer. Did he know anything about this cover-up that Frank was convinced was going on. “Leon,” Joe began carefully. “Do you know why no one who's not on the network doesn’t seem to have a clue about what’s really going on here?”
This time Leon did give a furtive look around the coffee shop. He didn’t recognize anyone in there, but just because he was friends with a few of the people in the Agency didn’t mean that he’d recognize all of their agents. “Walk with me,” Leon said, nodding his head toward the coffee shop door. “We can talk in my car if it’s all the same to you.” Or they could just go for a walk around the block.
Well that was an indication that Leon knew something. Not to mention that it lead credence to Frank’s paranoid ideas. Honestly, Joe would have been just as happy if Leon had laughed and told him it was just the way things were. He had kind of hoped for that, actually, so he could carry on with his life as it was. However, it seemed as though Frank had been right and Joe was about to find out for himself from an outside source how right he was.
Joe nodded “Yeah, sure.” He’d paid for his coffee already and left the coffee shop with Leon. Perhaps this conversation would have been better received sitting inside Leon’s classic beauty of a car, but Joe thought that two men sitting in a car deep in conversation may have lifted a few brows, so a walk around the block seemed like the better choice.
Once outside, Leon took a moment to drop the office doughnuts off in his car before beginning their walk. “People rarely see what they don’t want to,” Leon said. “Especially if they’re given a good excuse to not see it. I’m going to sound like a nut, but there’s this government agency, known only as The Agency, whose main purpose is to keep anyone who isn’t a dreamer in the dark about what goes on in this county.”
So Frank was right. It was something of a relief for Joe to know that Orange County hadn’t turned his brother completely paranoid. It was also quite alarming to actually hear confirmation that not only was there an agency that was covering everything up, but that they were sanctioned by the government. “So, it’s true, then,” Joe said with a grunt. “I’m not gonna lie, Leon, I was kinda hoping that you’d tell me it was all in my head.”
“Yeah, I wish it too,” he said. He pulled his cigarette pack from his pocket, and took a cigarette directly from the pack with his mouth before wordlessly offering the pack to Joe. “I’ve been told that they didn’t have anything to do with starting the dreams.” He believed that Peggy had no knowledge of them doing such a thing, but he still couldn’t believe that the Agency was entirely inculpable.
Joe glanced at the pack and shook his head. He’d flirted with a smoking habit in high school and college, but his family - in particular Aunt Gertrude - had made it clear that no Hardy Son was going to be a smoker.
Blue eyes returned to the detective beside him. “You’ve been told?” Joe questioned. “Who told you?”
“I used to be close with the director of the Agency,” Leon said vaguely. He and Peggy had casually dated for a while, but Peggy had found Steve, and Leon had somehow managed to end up falling for Revy of all people, so he guessed it had ended up all working out in the end, no matter how disappointed he’d been when Peggy had ended things. “And I’ve got a couple of other friends who work there.” It was a little surprising how many of his closest friends did end up working for the Agency, despite how much he hated it.
“Friends?” Joe asked, a brow arched a little skeptically. To hear Frank talk about the Agency, it had come across as a clandestine organization whose sole purpose was to keep people in the dark about what happened here. How was that possible if people knew who made up their ranks? What did the Agency actually do? What was its purpose? Could Joe even trust talking with Leon?
Joe stopped walking. “Leon, tell me straight up, what are we dealing with here? Is The Agency a threat? What is it they hope to accomplish?”
“I wish I could tell you something exact,” Leon said, frowning. “From what I’ve seen, the only threat is the fact that they keep key information from the public. Information that could help them. They claim their job is to protect the county from threats and to protect the dreamers from people who might be interested in studying how someone could, say, talk to animals for instance.” He sighed. “That’s what they say, at least. They don’t look into what causes the dreams, and they claim they didn’t start them in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they are behind this whole mess though.”
That was what Frank had told him too. Joe didn’t like the way it sounded when Frank had said it and he didn’t like hearing it from Leon either. A frown pulled tightly on the corners of his mouth. Why didn’t the agency look into what caused the Dreams. Why wasn’t anyone looking into the Dreams? Was the Agency responsible for the Dreams...for the bomb going off in his refrigerator? For the burned memories left in the parking lot reminding him of what he’d lost. Joe looked up at Leon. “I want to talk to them.”
“To the agents?” Leon asked, blinking in surprise. Joe wasn’t the first person who’d asked him about the Agency, but he was the first to ask to talk to someone himself. It wasn’t a bad idea though. There was only so much someone could learn from someone who wasn’t involved in the Agency itself. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Yes,” Joe nodded. He knew this was a bad idea. This went against everything he wanted - a normal life just being a mechanic and not investigating something - but Orange County seemed bond and determined to keep that from him and if he could get answers as to why he’d find some much needed solace. Even if he could find out what the Agency’s true purpose was, what they hoped to accomplish, he’d be able to tell Frank. “I need some answers, Leon. Something to go on here. So, if you could do that for me, I’ll owe you.”
Leon took a long drag of his cigarette, mulling over his next words. “I’ll see what I can do, but,” he pointed his cigarette at Joe, “I’m not sure if you’re going to get all the answers you’re looking for.” Honestly, not a lot of people seemed keen to be looking for answers, not even the members of the Agency. Even Leon had grown complacent the last few months after he’d tried looking everywhere and hadn’t managed to find a clue. Not that he didn’t still follow up on something if it looked promising, but he didn’t actively go looking for answers anymore.
Maybe that needed to change. Maybe Joe would stumble across the questions that Leon hadn’t asked.
“As long as I get some answers,” Joe said flatly. If he could get even one or two answers it would give him a starting point. Give him something to give his brother for his own investigation. It sure as hell beat just wandering around blindly as if in some kind of fog.
He reached into his back pocket and dug out one of the cards for the garage. His cell number was on the back. He handed one to Leon. “Give me a call and let me know, huh?”
Leon took the business card and glanced it over. He left his cigarette to dangle in his mouth as he removed his wallet from his pocket, and tucked the business card safely inside. Then, he put the wallet back in his pocket. “I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back from them,” he said. Which really shouldn’t take that long, once he got in contact with someone. After all, Sharon was his best friend.