The Hellion (collateralshot) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2019-01-13 19:55:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, dan smith, leon orcot |
Who: Dan and Leon
What: Burying the hatchet
When: Sometime in December
Where: The Double Tap
Rating/Warnings: Low
Status: Complete!
It had been too long since Leon had seen Dan, and Leon was pretty sure that was all his fault. Sure, Dan had pretty obviously given Leon the brush-off the first couple of times Leon had stopped by the bar after he and Liv had had their fight, but it had been Leon who’d not bothered to go back, even after he and Liv had made up. He didn’t really have any excuse, except for the fact that it was easier to drink alone, or with Alex, or at a different bar than apologize for something he wasn’t sure he deserved forgiveness for.
But, well, Alex was gone now. He’d left just before Christmas. And then Chris had run away, and Leon was beginning to realize just how lonely he’d made himself after everything. And, well, he missed Dan. He’d missed him a lot, if he was willing to admit that. Dan had somehow managed to become one of Leon’s best friends, and even if he wasn’t sure if he deserved that friendship, he was sure that he didn’t want to let it go.
Which is how he found himself walking into the Double Tap, closing the door to the wind and the snow behind him. He tapped the toes of his boots against the welcome mat to knock off any spare snow, and made his way to the bar. “Man, it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey out there,” he complained in Dan’s general direction, slipping onto his bar stool.
Usually by this time in the evening Dan had a number of customers to tend to. Even in the middle of the week, his regulars had come in by now, looking to wash away their days with some cheap booze and conversation. However, since the snow had started falling, people had apparently decided it was better to just stay home and drink rather than risk the nasty weather or getting attacked by snowmen or rogue mistletoe, or whatever else decided to show up during the Most Wonderful Time of the Year(™). This meant that the Double Tap was virtually empty when Leon came in. Even the part-time bartender Dan had hired so that he could have his evenings free had decided he was better off staying home. So, needless to say the last person Dan expected to come through the door was Leon Orcott.
A small frown pulled at the corners of Dan’s mouth at the sight of the detective. Yes, he knew that Leon and Liv had made up and he was grateful for that at least. But Dan himself was still a bit angry with Leon for putting Liv in the position he had in the first place and then fly off the handle at her without so much as an explanation. Nevermind the betrayal Dan himself felt over the idea that Leon didn’t trust them with the truth, didn’t trust him. Then Leon had stopped coming in to the Double Tap altogether. Though, Dan couldn’t really fault him for that. He wasn’t as though he’d gone out of his way to make Leon feel welcome there.
Well, Leon was here now and the first and only customer Dan’d had all evening. He couldn’t exactly turn him away. Besides, the weather was particularly nasty tonight and Dan wasn’t completely heartless as to send Leon back out into it. “Aye,” he said. “Come in to get out of the cold, have you, Leon?”
“You bet,” Leon said, blowing on the hands that he was rubbing together. “Thought it might be an idea to come in and get something that might warm me up. Whiskey, neat.” Only then did he take a look around the bar, noticing just how empty it was, and he offered Dan a wry smile. “Looks like I’m the only idiot dumb enough to go out in this.”
“Aye, that you are,” Dan answered. He didn’t mean for his tone to be as cold as the wind outside, but he couldn’t help it. He wanted to be nice to Leon. He wanted to bury the hatchet and get back to the way things had been before. But it wasn’t that easy. Dan had his pride. He hadn’t exactly been the best kind of friend the past several weeks. Even when he’d learned about Alex leaving and Chris going missing. He should have done something then, but he hadn’t. He’d picked up his phone intending to at least call, but his pride had prevented him from actually going through with it.
Dan barely afforded Leon a look as he poured two fingers of whiskey into a glass and then slid it in front of the detective. “Then again, I’m ‘ere too. So we’re both idiots.”
The silence that followed was oppressing and awkward and Dan hated it. He felt as though he should say something to Leon, but everything that sprang immediately to mind were words threatening to start a fight. The last thing either of them really needed was to prolong this animosity or make it worse. Dan should make some kind of effort to bridge the chasm. For Liv. For himself and Leon too. Leon was here now. That meant something.
Dan turned and put the bottle back on the shelf behind the bar. “Liv told me ‘bout Alex,” he said quietly, but loud enough for Leon to hear. “‘Bout Chris too. I’m sorry, Leon.”
Maybe coming here was a mistake, Leon thought to himself. Dan obviously didn’t seem very pleased to see him. He probably would have been better off going to McNally’s. At least Shannon was friendly, and let him crash in the bar for the night if he needed to.
He put his hand in front of the glass’s slide, and in the same motion brought the drink to his lips, not sure if he should respond that at least Dan just had to walk up the stairs at the end of the night if he didn’t want to venture back out into the cold. But maybe their relationship wasn’t like that anymore. It sure didn’t feel like it.
He’d just come to the decision to down the rest of his drink, and pick something up on the way home that he could drink on the couch, when Dan spoke again. “Thanks,” he muttered. “Can’t say I blame him. Alex, I mean.” He frowned to himself. “Or Chris for that matter. I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing when it comes to kids.”
“Alex’s loss, if you ask me,” he said reflexively and then caught himself, biting off the rest of his thought. He glanced wearily over his shoulder back at Leon. Christ, the poor guy looked so fucking pathetic sitting there with his drink in an empty bar. Dan felt his anger bristle again, but this time rather than being angry at Leon, Dan was angry for Leon.
“Ah, hell,” he muttered under his breath before grabbing the whiskey off the shelf again. He pulled out another glass and then took both it and the bottle round to the other side of the bar. He sat with a grunt next to Leon and poured them both another two fingers of whiskey. When he spoke next, his voice was low, but lacked the same bitter chill it’d had earlier. “I got nothin’ to say ‘bout Alex other than you didn’t deserve to be left,” he said as he poured the liquor. “Not when everythin’s said and done. As fer your brother, ah hell…” he took a drink and then looked at the amber liquid in his glass pensively. “There’s no reason why ye should know whatcher doin’. But ye always seemed to have his best interest in mind. More than can be said about some parents out there.”
He glanced at Leon sidelong. “I’m still mad atcha, mind you,” he stated flatly, as though Leon needed the reminder.
Leon couldn’t help but smile a little when Dan came and sat next to him. He’d never really been upset with Dan, and it was good to see the other man warming up to him a little bit.
“This place… does things to people,” Leon muttered. Himself included. He couldn’t imagine have ever letting a murderer walk the streets, especially if he knew exactly who it was, if it hadn’t been for the dreams or the general weirdness of the place. “Alex probably had the right idea, really.” He sighed then. “And good intentions or not, I don’t know if I’m the best fit for Chris. I wish D was here.” He’d said it before he’d even thought about it, and then scowled fiercely into his glass. The last thing he wanted was that smirking psychopath to show up in the OC, even if D was great with Chris.
He shook his head as if to dispel the thought all together, and turned to Dan, frowning a little. “Look, I shouldn’t have yelled at Liv like that, but I already apologized to her.” It wasn’t as if he’d done anything to Dan.
“Aye, this place’ll change ya,” Dan agreed softly. “Fer better and fer worse.” He finished off what was left in his glass and then reached for the bottle to refill it. He didn’t look at Leon. “I know ya have.” He said. “But it ain’t just ‘bout Liv.” Granted that Dan’s initial anger towards Leon had been for Liv’s sake and he should have let that go when the two had made up. But he hadn’t; and at the time Dan wasn’t really sure why. It hadn’t been until Leon had wandered into his bar that evening that the reasons his anger had continued started making sense.
Dan paused looking at the bottle and attempting to get his thoughts in order. Finally he sighed. “I was mad atcha for yellin’ at Liv, never mind putting her in the position ye had. You do understand that, don’tcha? Liv is a zombie who has to eat brains in order to survive. The best way she can do that without raising suspicions is to eat the brains of the poor dead souls who end up under her knife. The way she justifies that to herself is her sense of justice for those people. You had t’ know the moment that body ended up in her morgue she wouldn’t have been able to let it be, right? Having to give up on that investigation in order to save her friendship with you was the hardest decision she had to make and not one she took lightly, either. She’d never do anything to hurt you, Leon, she wanted to help.”
Dan sighed. “And so did I, if I’m being honest. You went outta yer way to help me those few months back and despite what you did for me then, I know yer a good cop. Hell, I believe you did what you did then because yer a good cop. When I found out Alex had been arrested under suspicion for shooting you and then that vic came through Liv’s morgue…I didn’t know what t’ think. We knew Alex wasn’t guilty, and the last thing I wanted was fer you to get mixed in some kind of cover-up shit. I figured if we found out what really happened we’d be able to help. We’d be able to protect you or sommat.”
Another more resigned sigh. “Ah, but we were putting our noses where they didn’t belong, weren’t we,” he said as he set the bottle down again. “But the thing of it is, Leon, that you didn’t trust us. That was the real slap in the face. After everything was all said and done, you didn’t trust us enough to come to us. We are your friends, lad.” Here Dan glanced at Leon, “or lest that’s what I thought. However, the more I thought ‘bout it, the more I realized that might not be the case. Ah, sure, yer friendly with Liv an’ all, but what am I but yer bartender or, at the very most, Liv’s Boyfriend. Nothin’ more. So while I considered you to be my friend, what reason do you have to consider me yours? None, I suppose. I’m not ashamed to say that hurt a hell of a lot worse. A bit selfish of me, now that I think about it, to be angry at you over that, but here we are.” He downed his shot.
Leon winched a little when Dan brought up the prison escape from all those months ago. It was just another reminder about what Leon had become. He was now the kind of cop that had always pissed him off: one that looked the other way so long as it was his friends. Even if he knew that that both Dan and Alex were innocent, he wasn’t. Not any more.
But as Dan continued, he realized he had more to fix than just his damaged reputation as a cop. He’d been so caught up in, well, all of it, that he hadn’t once spared a thought to how it might be affecting the people around him. “That’s not it,” he said, emphatically. “It’s not that I don’t think of you as a friend, Dan. Sad as it might sound to you, you’re one of the best ones I’ve got. It’s just…” He ran a hand through his hair, then pulled a cigarette from the pack in his pocket, trying his best to think about how he wanted to finish that sentence. He took a long drag from his cigarette, and his shoulders slumped. “It’s just that I didn’t want to know how it had happened. I thought that if I just didn’t know how it was done, I could pretend I had nothing to do with it. I could pretend that the poor asshole who took the fall was just some chump who’d died for some completely unrelated reason, and that whoever was behind Alex getting out picked the first conveniently dead guy he could find. And then when I saw the sketch…”
Well, at that point, it became obvious that his death wasn’t completely unrelated. Not if Damon Salvator, Alex’s ex-Something, was the one who did it.
Dan leveled Leon with a skeptical look, but not an unkind look. “Ye wouldna been able t’ let it go,” he stated. “I’ve heard ye go on an’ on about D in your Dreams and how frustrated that S.O.B. makes you. Ye may ‘ave thought ye could just ignore it, but it woulda eaten at you the same way.”
He poured them each another shot. “You are a good person, Leon. A good man. That might be a small comfort for you, but it’s what I believe. And I’m pleased and honored to know you think of me as a friend.” He set the bottle down.
“I’ve got to let it go,” Leon said, and then, without thinking of it, slammed his fist down on the bar. “Shit, Dan, I know who did it and I can’t make a move against him.” Not without risking Alex going back to prison, not to mention his and Logan’s careers and getting anyone else who was involved in the whole thing in trouble. In a single gulp, he knocked back the drink that Dan had just poured for him, not sure how to respond to the rest of what Dan said. He didn’t believe much in self-pity, but he wasn’t entirely sure how anyone could be honoured to be thought of as his friend, not when he felt as bent as a pseudo-psychic’s spoon.
Dan was unphased by Leon’s outburst and abuse of his bar. It had seen worse than a slammed fist over the last couple of years. He did lift a brow in response to Leon’s declaration that he knew who was responsible for the murder, though. He shouldn’t have been surprised, given the reaction he’d had to the sketch of the suspect Liv had done, but still...
“Do you, now?” He asked calmly. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and selected one before handing the pack to Leon. “Then ye got a coupla options. A: you do let it go and move on. B: you turn in the murderer and face whatever consequences that may bring. Or C: you tell me who it is and let me handle it from here.” He lit his cigarette. “Whichever you choose, Leon, I’ll stand behind you.”
“Thanks,” Leon said, butting out his dogeared cigarette and pulling a fresh one from Dan’s pack. And then, he sat in silence, mulling over the options. More than anything, he wanted to just turn Damon in. If he wasn’t sure that doing so would mess up more than just his life - there was Alex, and Logan, and, he realized with a start, Chris, to think about - then he would have done it in a heartbeat.
And the last time he’d let someone else ‘handle it,’ an innocent man had turned up dead. It was, as far as Leon was concerned, as much his fault for not asking for the details as it was anyone else’s. Besides, it wasn’t as though Dan was a cop these days. What could he do about it?
After a while, Leon let out a heavy sigh. “I gotta live with this,” Leon said after a moment. “I dug this grave and now I’ve got to lie in it.”
Dan couldn’t say that he necessarily agreed with Leon’s choice. There was a part of him that was itching to do just one more last job. This wasn’t about him though. This was about Leon. Dan let out a puff of smoke. “Aye,” he said. “That’s probably for the best at this point.” He clapped a reassuring hand on Leon’s shoulder. “Just remember yer not alone in this, alright? Next time something crazy goes down, promise me you’ll come to either me or Liv, alright? Let us help you. That’s what friends are for.”
“In this place, that means that I’d never leave you two alone,” Leon said with a wry smile. But he knew what Dan meant. It was more than just the shuffling undead or the Freaky Friday antics of this place. “Thanks, man.” He took a drag of his cigarette and frowned. “And you know, if I ever piss you off again, you can just clock me and call it even. We don’t have to do all of… this again.”
Dan chuckled. “I think I can live with that,” he said. He lazily clinked his glass against Leon’s before taking a drink from it.