Who: Leon and Anakin What: Leon gets computer help When: Shortly after this exchange Where: Anakin's place Rating/Warnings: Low/none Status: Complete
Leon was still angry, but really he was feeling more defeated than anything. Veronica had been right, he had no one but himself to be angry about when it came to his busted computer or his wall. Maybe he’d overreacted, but he’d needed that video, and he’d needed it on something that was bigger than the size of his palm. Maybe solving this murder wouldn’t make up for busting Dan out of jail, but actually doing his job instead of committing felonies couldn’t hurt.
He’d gathered up what was left of his laptop, the monitor just barely hanging on to the keyboard part, stuffed it into a bag, and made his way to the address Anakin had given him, where he knocked on the door.
---
Anakin happened to notice Leon’s approach to his apartment- guests usually mistook his apartment for a dilapidated and abandoned warehouse so he was used to having to guide people to the right entrance. He left the window and punched to comm button by his front door with his fist.
“Go to the death trap elevator at the end of the hall.” It resembled a rusted cage a cartoon villain might use to trap large, dangerous animals, and sounded like corroded metal grinding a tantrum in hell’s living room. “I’m on the third floor. Then my door is the metal one painted yellow, Three-C.” His voice would sound like tin on the other side.
Then he hit the buzzer unlocking the building’s front door.
---
Leon did not like the sight of warehouse as he pulled up, and he didn’t particularly enjoy Anakin describing the elevator as a death trap. He patted the side arm he had in his shoulder holsters, under his denim jacket. It was only recently when he started carrying it when he was off-duty, but there’d been too many times when he’d been caught unarmed when the weird shit in the OC went down. After he, Alex, and Chris had run into the killer rabbits at Easter, he had taken to carrying it with him wherever he went.
He pulled the door open when the buzzer sounded, and stepped inside. He took one look at the elevator, and decided it would probably be a better idea to take the stairs. The staircase wasn’t pretty, but at least he wouldn’t be worried about the damn thing breaking down and being stuck in it for the next ten hours (which, judging from the state of the apartment, was a very generous estimate of how long it would take for maintenance to come to free him), or having the whole thing fall out from under his feet.
He took the stairs two at a time, and made it up to the third floor probably quicker than the rust bucket would have taken anyway. It wasn’t hard to find the yellow door with 3-C on it, and he knocked.
---
Anakin opened the door and held out his left (real) hand out for the laptop as a way of greeting. “Unlock your cell phone.” Then he stepped back to give him room to enter.
Belatedly he said, “Leon?” Probably something he should have verified first, but he lacked the fear about this place that others had developed.
“You can sit where…” He looked around. His apartment was all one big open room, save for the bathroom which was, of course, in its own room. But along one wall was the kitchen area, and the far wall opposite wall was his bed. Aside from mismatched furniture, he’d done nothing to make the space feel less like a sectioned off corner of a warehouse.
As to the matter of where Leon could sit, that was problematic. Anakin wasn’t the tidiest person. His bed was unkempt, a pile of clothes lay on the floor next to the bed. His kitchen table and counters were covered in dishes and take-out containers. And then of course there was his collection of computers and monitors.
He led the way to a section along one wall lined with tables covered in various computer towers and monitors. Some on, some not. Some half cannibalized or in various states of repair. He stopped at chair covered in electronic parts and used his robotic prosthetic arm* to push them all to the ground.
“You can sit there,” he said, gesturing. “If you want soda, I have some in the fridge. Uh, it’s all caffeine free,” he added. “It makes me sleepy. And no alcohol.” He held up his robotic arm as an explanation for that.
If Leon took him up on the offer, he would find everything in Anakin’s fridge, even each individual soda can, sporting a pair of stick-on google-y eyes. Like the can of rootbeer Anakin had on the desk in front of him now. It was his latest silly habit, to stick a pair of ridiculous eyes on every food product he purchased.
*(ooc: Just for reference, this is what his prosthetic hand/arm look like right now: http://bebionic.com/)
---
The mess didn’t bother Leon too much. He himself rarely did any cleaning. Alex did a good job of making sure his apartment remained manageable, but before he’d started spending so much time at the apartment, Leon’s counters and floors had been filled with empty beer bottles and dirty clothes. He’d even been known to find dirty socks in his kitchen sink at times.
He took a glance at Anakin’s arm as he walked in, but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t any of his business, though it was a pretty slick looking prosthetic. More high tech than most of the ones he’d seen in his life.
It was with some hesitation that he unlocked his phone and handed it off to Anakin. It was both his work phone and his personal phone and he didn’t know how he felt about someone digging around on there, but, then, he figured that he’d be with him the entire time so the chances of Anakin stumbling upon something Leon didn’t want him to see were pretty slim.
“What’s the point of caffeine free soda?” Leon grumbled tactlessly to himself as he made his way to the kitchen. When he opened the fridge, he hesitated, and gave a wary eye at all the googly eyed cans. The hell was with this dude? Not for the first time in the last five minutes, he wondered if he wasn’t making some kind of mistake, because this? Was kind of weird.
He grabbed a can of rootbeer, and then called over his shoulder “While I’m here, you want one?”
--
“Sure,” Anakin called back to Leon, completely unfazed by any odd looks or commentary about his “food management” system. Guests were free to like or dislike the personification of his food stuffs.
He slipped his single handed keyboard onto his left hand and pulled up a variety of programs on one of his many screens on his desk. His prosthetic might be the best Earth had to offer, but it was still rather new for him, and he still wasn’t quite there at typing two handed at an acceptable rate yet.
“Do you know what your operating system on your laptop is?” he asked as he turned from his desktop screens to grab a set of screwdrivers.
“I do have to take this apart to get at your hard drive,” he said, pointing with the screwdriver. “Just making sure you get that.”
--
Leon grabbed the second root beer, and put it in front of Anakin, catching his index finger under the tab and cracking it open as he pulled his hand away with all the skill of someone who drank a lot of beer. He found an emptyish looking area of the desk to lean against as Anakin worked, and stared his can of rootbeer in the eyes for a moment, trying to decide, before he cracked his own can open, if he should remove the eyes beforehand. It seemed wrong somehow to drink something that would stare back at him.
He was taken aback a little when Anakin asked him what the OS of his computer was. He barely knew what an OS was at all, let alone what his computer was. “Uh,” he said, and then scowled as Anakin explained that he had to take the computer apart to get at the harddrive. “Well I know that,” Leon snapped, even if he hadn’t really thought about it before that moment. But his pride was a little wounded. “It’s a Windows something,” he said after a moment.
--
Anakin grabbed what appeared to be a small, random Tupperware container and then started working on the screws. But the purpose of the container became clear as soon as the first screw was free and Anakin dropped it into the plastic bowl. Anakin might be messy, but he knew when to keep things in order, like right now.
Leon’s lack of software knowledge wasn’t a big deal, a more definite answer would have been helpful, but Anakin would figure it out soon on his own.
“So what kind of crime was it?” he asked while he worked.
--
“Homicide,” answered Leon, taking his attention off his root beer and watching Anakin as he worked. “Buddy got shot out behind a bar. My guess is he picked a fight with the wrong person, but I’ll be damned if any witnesses have shown up.” It seemed like an easy enough case, but sometimes these ones were the most annoying cases to get, especially if no obvious suspects turned up.
--
All the screws were out now, Anakin picked up the flathead screwdriver and pried all around under the edge of the bottom of the laptop until it came completely off. He set that piece aside, then started working on the hard drive casing.
“This happen in an area where people usually resolve their fights with guns?”
--
“Well, it wasn’t at the Hampton, that’s for sure,” Leon grumbled. Leon had a soft spot for dive bars; he’d take cheap drinks over fancy tablecloths any day of the week, and his favourite bar, the Double Tap, could definitely be considered a dive. But he knew that they weren’t always the safest place to be. “Bar fights are pretty common, though most of them don’t end in anything much worse than a broken tooth or two. Just this guy’s unlucky day, I guess.”
--
“You guess?”
The casing around the hard drive wasn’t difficult to remove, Anakin had it off in no time. Next he was reaching for a small looking device. It didn’t appear much different from an external hard drive, but it in fact, had the ability to pop open, and for the most part it was empty inside. The chamber inside the device was meant to be filled with the hard drive he’d just removed from Leon’s broken laptop, which he was now pushing to the side (but not too far away, he wanted to still see what was salvageable) and pulling over one of his own. He shut the portable casing for Leon’s hard drive and plugged it into one of the USB ports of the laptop he’d just grabbed.
Because it would take a while for everything to configure, he pulled Leon’s broken laptop back over and started examining what could be saved.
“So it’s not usual for a fight to resolve in gun violence for that area? So it was just an unlucky night? Nothing makes it stand out?”
--
“I wouldn’t say gun violence is especially common over there, but fights are. You know, people get some booze in them and want to hit something. But aside from the fact that a man’s dead, no, nothing really stands out. I sure don’t think that whoever did it is out making macaroni art with his victim’s fingernails or something like that. But, you know, I kinda wish something did make it stand out more. When people get creative is when people start fucking up. Makes my job a whole lot easier.” Normally, at least.
--
Anakin shot him a look.
“That’s not exactly what I was asking.”
Having been in the air force, there was a possibility that Anakin had killed someone, though, it hadn’t been down in the dirt in open combat. But from up high, where his targets where just dots, so removed from the idea of the concept of possessing humanity. He tried not to think about it outside of therapy.
“It’s unique enough that it happened at all, right?” He started unscrewing a part that showed promise of survival.
“So, why that place, why that victim?”
--
“Probably because it was a place that serves alcohol, and probably because he was drunk,” Leon said flatly. Maybe a murder was unique to Anakin, but at this point it was far from unusual as far as Leon was concerned. Sometimes, there was a bigger meaning to things, but Leon learned long ago that most of the time it was a case of tempers getting out of control, usually while inebriated. Just the plain bad luck of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or getting involved with the wrong person.
He sighed and rubbed the side of his head. “Usually there is no bigger meaning to these things. It’s just that people are scum. How’s it look?” The last was with a nod toward what was left of his laptop.
--
Fair enough.
Anakin was about to be more acquainted with murder than he was willing to let on. The dreams never stopped, he had been told, and his destiny was a slow slide down the darkest parts of humanity.
He checked the laptop Leon’s hard drive was connected to. A few keystrokes and he had the information he needed.
“Your hard drive is fine. If you leave it with me over night I can put its contents on this laptop if you want. I can stop it for now and take the pictures off your phone and show you how to do that so in the future you don’t have to use me again.”
--
Leon frowned. He really didn’t like the idea of just leaving his laptop with some guy he’d never met. Some guy who put eyes on his fucking soda cans. But it wasn’t like he had any other options. Chris would be off school pretty soon and he didn’t really have the time or the desire to just hang around in an apartment filled with techno-whatever. “If you look at anything on there, I’ll have you in cuffs so fast your head will spin,” Leon said, jabbing a finger in Anakin’s direction. “But if you could show me how to move shit around, that’d be a help.”
--
Anakin’s only response was to lift an eyebrow. And he let the awkwardness hang for a moment.
“This isn’t an elaborate plan to get some rando’s files,” he said at last. “I don’t even need to sit and watch as the transfer happens. It’s a few prompts and go. I’ll probably be asleep while it all happens… Hoping I don’t dream.” He mumbled that last sentence.
But he turned the unbroken laptop to face Leon while he remotely accessed into it from his desk top. He looked at the phone and checked the connection. And then fished around for a cord. It wasn’t necessary, but having a backup in place helped.
“You get this, too. So no more throwing your new-ish laptop.”
He manipulated the cursor on the desk top so it showed up on the laptop, moving it to the task bar on the laptop. “See this small icon down here?”
--
Leon frowned a little when Anakin mentioned his dreams. Leon had dreams of his own, though his dreams didn’t seem too bad in the grand scheme of things. He didn’t wake up half drowned like Alex, or as a zombie like Liv. Sometimes his dreams were a little on the grotesque side, but sometimes they were, more or less, totally normal. “You dream too, huh? What are yours like?”
He nodded. “Yeah?” he said, leaning in a little to get a better look at the screen.
--
Anakin scowled. “Slavery and cults,” he said, hoping that was distasteful enough to head off any questions.
“This icon indicates you have a wireless connections between your devices. You can see the same on your phone up here,” Anakin pointed to the right icon on Leon’s phone.
“To move files from one device to the other, just right click on your file icon on your laptop.” Anakin moved the cursor over to the file icon on the task bar, right-clicked the file icon, which pulled up a list of accessible files.
“Got to File Explorer, which will open this window.” A window with different folders opened up. “Pay attention to the file links on the left side. You want to pick the one called Networks. Which will open all your drives accessible to you through your laptop.”
Anakin moved the cursor to show what he meant, but also pointed to the left of the window.
“From here, you just find your phone on this list and open it. And then you can transfer the files to wherever you want on your computer. I can write the steps down for you so you don’t forget.”
--
It was enough to dissuade Leon from asking more. As far as he was concerned, people’s private lives were private, so long as he didn’t suspect them of something. He didn’t need to know what happened in people’s dreams unless they wanted to talk about it. After all, people didn’t need to know about his random accidental picnics with D, or his daily teas with him, and they probably didn’t care anyway. So all he said was “sounds rough,” and then focused on Anakin’s explanation.
The way Anakin explained things, it seemed easy enough. He rubbed the side of his head. Computers had always frustrated him. “Yeah, that might be an idea,” he grumbled.