InsaneJournal

Who: Leon Orcot and David Rose
What: Leon comes to check out Rose Apothecary starting work there
When: This afternoon
Where: Rose Apothecary
Warnings: Fairly low. Some chat about the devil's lettuce and Leon gets kind of cop-y about it. Two grown men have a giggle fit.


Skin cream was probably something Leon could have used - the last ten years travelling the world hadn’t been easy on him or his face, and even before that he’d been prone to scowling - but wasn’t something Leon had ever actually used or had any desire to use. In fact, he looked incredibly out of place in this particular shop, even as he glanced through the shelves, picking up and examining anything that looked interesting and peculiar before he put it down again. The white leather sports jacket he wore was nice enough, and his sneakers were dirty but high quality, but the grey t-shirt he wore underneath it had seen better days and his boot cut blue jeans were tattered and worn. He was at least clean shaven, and while his short blond hair was a little messy, it could have been (but was not) styled that way.

“Fifteen dollars?!” he muttered to himself, appalled at the small, hand-sized bottle of skin cream he now held in his palm.

***

David barely noticed him come in. He’d agreed to a bit of a tour, sure, but they hadn’t gotten more specific than that, so beyond a once over and a wrinkling of his nose at the condition of Leon’s clothes, he hadn’t paid him much attention at all. So of course he had yet to recognize him as the same guy he had been talking to over the network. He was too busy meticulously returning products to the spots they were supposed to inhabit, a never ceasing duty thanks to people’s habits of picking up products and putting them down wherever they felt like.

He was just returning a bottle of hand cream to the display- a bottle that someone had left in one of the bins of bathbombs, who even does that??- when he heard the appalled little mutter about his pricing. He finally turned his attention fully on the man who had entered his store to give him a more discerning up and down. Enough to recognize him, at least.

David’s own clothes weren’t entirely what they had once been. Even with a built in job for him from the moment he’d arrived, with a well established customer base, that didn’t change the fact that his wardrobe hadn’t followed him from Schitt’s Creek, and a successful business wasn’t enough to entirely rebuild a wardrobe that he had built over many years, while spending many thousands of dollars. That didn’t make his current outfit any less meticulously chosen than ever.

The fuzzy black and white sweater emblazoned with abstract geometric shapes wasn’t a Givenchy, but it was real cashmere and had been hand knitted locally. The high top sneakers were new- Vans and not Neil Barrett as he would have preferred- but the black skinny jeans had actually been used. They looked too good and fit too well to pass on, but he’d dry cleaned them multiple times before deigning to wear them. So suffice to say, even though David’s current outfit had actually cost less than $300 to put together, he still gave off the exact opposite vibe to Leon. And he was definitely judging the fact that those jeans and that t-shirt were worn, not artfully distressed. There was potential here, in that actually pretty nice jacket especially, and Leon was squandering it.

“It’s organic, cruelty free, and locally sourced. Do you expect Walmart prices?” He finally questioned with a bit of a grimace. “Do you own other pants?”

***

“I’d expect something that wasn’t highway robbery,” Leon responded, and then scowled. “And yeah, I own another pair of pants, but they pretty much look like these ones.” Leon hadn’t owned anything more than what he could carry in a duffle bag for a decade, and two pairs of pants was the minimum: he needed to be able to wear something when he had a pair at the laundromat. “What’s wrong with my pants?”

Yeah, okay, he was supposed to be here looking for a job, but he hadn’t started this.

***

“It’s not highway robbery, it’s paying for quality.” He replied matter-of-factly, because that was the honest to god truth. He didn’t even upcharge that much, just enough to make sure that he and his sources both got their fair share and a bit of extra to cover the store’s overhead.

There had been a point to the question about Leon’s pants, but he nearly forgot it for a moment as he just stared at him in response to his answer. Had he- had he really just implied he owned one other pair of pants? David pulled one of his hands free from where both arms had been wrapped around his middle, a somewhat automatic and almost defensive posture he sometimes just defaulted to, and dragged it down the side of his face with a sigh. “I’m just pretty sure they’re about to rip in about ten different places and I don’t want someone associated with this store in any capacity accidentally flashing my customers that much leg. I will buy you new pants if you promise to burn the old ones.”

***

“Oh,” Leon said, blushing in embarrassment. He’d known plenty of rich assholes - which he figured this guy had been, given the state of his own clothes - but he probably shouldn’t have just jumped to conclusions like he had. “These have probably got another couple years of wear in them, but I can buy my own jeans if they’re going to be a problem for you.”

Most of the money he’d spent from his arrival had gone toward his car rental when he’d explored the island looking for D - he did not trust those Waypoints - but other than that he’d spent very little of it, and most of that had come back when he’d found a random $400 added to the rest of his total.

“I guess you’ve gathered that I’m Leon,” he added after a moment.

***

It was a fair conclusion to jump to, really. David had spent most of his life a rich asshole, and while he wasn’t rich anymore, he was definitely still an asshole. Just less of an asshole than he had been before he’d learned a bit of humility and compassion. He eyed the jeans again, appraising, for several long seconds before looking back up at Leon’s slightly flushed face. Oh- yeah, basically accusing him of being one ripped stitch away from a public strip tease had probably been at least a little embarrassing. See? Absolutely still an asshole. But an asshole reformed enough to at least feel kind of bad about that.

“I’m not going to make you buy new jeans just to unload a truck for me once a week if you’re… fine with those.” He said ‘fine’ like the very term in this context was utterly incomprehensible. Like he was suggesting someone might be fine with coating themselves in live bees. At the obviously unnecessary introduction he let out a bit of a snort and held out the hand that wasn’t still wrapped around his own rib cage in offering. “Yeah, no, I figured that out when I realized you had no intention of touching anything in here with a price tag. David Rose, proprietor. Obviously.”

***

There had been a time when Leon had had a style. Not a good style, probably - he’d had a mullet and owned multiple crop tops, including one particular outfit that consisted of a crop top worn on top of a button-down shirt, but he had been a style. His favourite hobby had consisted of buying weird, funny, and unique t-shirts and wearing them at every available occasion - even to work, and when he’d left LA he’d had over a hundred t-shirts that he’d needed to donate.

And he was expecting to be stuck here for a while, at least until he could afford to pay someone to smuggle him out of Vallo. He didn’t expect that to be cheap. Most importantly, he had a place of his own here. He wasn’t sleeping under bridges or in doorways or in cheap hostels where he was sharing a room with a half-dozen strangers. So maybe, maybe he could buy another pair of jeans, and maybe some t-shirts that weren’t monochrome, $5 Wal-Mart brand shirts.

He wasn’t going to make any promises about it though.

“Nice to meet you,” Leon said, taking David’s hand and giving it a shake. “And yeah, nothing here’s really my style, but at least that means you don’t have to worry about me pocketing anything off the truck.” He gave what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

***

The reassuring smile was reassuring, really, but the words that preceded it had rather the opposite effect. David doubted it had been intentional, but they really had been the opposite of reassuring, and that was so ridiculous he couldn’t help a quiet laugh as he gave Leon’s hand a shake in return and then released it to tuck his arm back where it had been.

“Okay, so notice how no one was saying anything about the idea of you pocketing products from the back of the truck? And then you brought the idea up? Can you see how that kind of just planted a worry in my head that I definitely didn’t have thirty seconds ago?” He asked, lips quirked in a bit of a sideways grin to show that he wasn’t seriously worried about it, but the point still stood. He hadn’t even considered the idea that this guy was a thief, but now, stupid as it was, the thought was there.

“I won’t screw you out of the employee discount, even if this isn’t your style and you’re getting paid under the table. I think cheese and wine is most people’s style, anyway.” He tipped his head in the direction of the wine fridge by the register, then paused for a moment, biting at his lower lip in thought. “You know what, you said you were a detective too, right? Doesn’t that job actually involve like… a metric ton of paperwork? Do you know how to use Excel? If so I might have something more substantial I could be paying you for than lifting some boxes of body milk.”

He was pretty sure police work was about 10% legwork and 90% paperwork, and he was also pretty sure that they had a very decently sized backlog of inventory spreadsheets that needed to be dealt with.

***

Leon grimaced. "Sorry. Met enough thieves and murderers in my life that that's usually my first assumption about people." He was only half exaggerating. Maybe it wasn't always his first thought, but it was a consideration for almost everyone. "I'm more of a whiskey guy than wine though. If you sell that, then we're golden."

His shoulders tensed when David mentioned paperwork and Excel. "I haven't used Excel since the 90s," he admitted. "And even then, I think if the police department could have gotten away with not paying me for their paperwork, they probably would have." Leon's had always been filled with typoes, and once Jill had become his partner, she'd made a point of proofing every single report and email he'd written before he sent it in. Truth be told, paperwork was the one thing about police work that Leon could do without. Even the whole getting shot and winding up half-dead in a hospital thing was better than spending an hour in front of his computer trying to complete a report.

But he did need money for whatever criminal he was going to pay to get him out of here, and he had hours to fill now that his search for D was stalled. "But if you don't mind the odd spelling mistake, I could probably figure it out."

***

David was always a little bit tense around new people, but somehow this talk about assuming people were thieves and murderers was actually easing some of that tension. Because sure, that he could agree with. “Oh, murderers, yeah. I’ve watched enough Forensic Files to know that literally anyone you meet at any moment could be a murderer. This is why we’re having this conversation while the store is open and not after hours when you could just pull me into the stockroom back there and stab me to death.”

He was joking, and his own growing comfort showed in the way he loosened his little self hug and relaxed some of his weight against the counter beside the register. He genuinely was always a little bit distrustful of literally everyone on the planet, and the possibility of being murdered was an anxious thought that plagued him more frequently than he would care to admit in any serious way, but he could at least see it was stupid enough to make self deprecating jokes about.

“Unfortunately ‘no’ to selling whiskey, but my sister’s boyfriend has some kind of magical medieval liquor supply and she once brought me the smoothest whiskey I’ve ever tasted, so if you’re into that I do have contacts.” It wasn’t an exaggeration. Whatever the hell Alexis had nabbed from Skyhold the night he first arrived, it had gone down with the smoothest of burns.

“Oh god, do not feel like you have to take that offer.” He was not blind to that tense, vaguely miserable look at the mention of spreadsheets and paperwork.

“Do you think I would be asking if I enjoyed doing it either? No, this-” He gestured down to basically his entire self, “-is someone with a vision and great ideas for branding, not someone who’s good at marking down inventory. Excel really hasn’t changed that much since the 90s, though, and it’s not even that hard. I can do it, I just hate it. If you want to do it along with the physical stocking, I could put you on the actual payroll, but I’m not going to pretend it’s not the most boring job here.”

***

“I’m really more of a firearms kinda guy instead of a knife guy,” Leon said, grinning. Okay, maybe not the best way to put someone at ease, but it was right there. “Lucky for you, I sold my gun for airfare about five years back.” Eventually, it had become too much of a pain to travel with it, especially in countries with tight gun control. Japan, where he’d just come from, had a complete ban on handguns altogether, which meant even if he’d still had it, he would have had to find something to do with it before he’d gone to Tokyo.

“Listen, if I ever say no to someone offering me whiskey, you can probably just go ahead and assume I’ve been replaced by a body snatcher.” Whiskey was the one constant in Leon’s life; no matter where he went in the world, chances were there was whiskey. And if there wasn’t, well, he didn’t especially want to be there.

Leon frowned, wanting, wanting so very badly to take the out that had just been offered him, and then he sighed, angrily, and rubbed the side of his head, messing up his hair even more. “If you’re willing to pay me more for the paperwork than the unloading, then I’ll do it,” he grumbled. “It’ll probably be a pain in the ass, but I’m going to need the money. Hell, I could get started right now if you want. I’ve got nothing better going on.”

***

“Great! I definitely needed to be picturing myself getting caught in a drive by when I was already thinking about being stabbed.” David retorted, pulling an exaggerated grimace. Despite the subject matter, this clearly wasn’t anything he actually needed to worry about. It was just banter, and banter was second nature to him.

It was still clear from his expression that Leon absolutely didn’t want to accept this tentative job offer, and David actually felt a little bad about the fact that he seemed to think he had no choice. There were plenty of other job opportunities in Vallo, but probably not many that he could pick up or leave at the drop of a hat like this one he was offering, so it was true that it probably wasn’t the worst he could get, even if it was about as interesting as watching paint dry.

“I could always use another person to help man the store, but you made it pretty clear you don’t have an interest in sales, and we would absolutely have to buy you at least a couple new wardrobe pieces for that.” He pointed out after a moment, but still flitted behind the counter to pull up Excel on the computer attached to the register.

“It’s really just about making sure everything on our order forms is entered into the right field in the inventory list so we know how much we have. Anything scanned as sold is automatically subtracted from the total. Don’t even worry about it if you make a typo, I made one a few weeks ago and we ended up with six extra cases of sauvignon blanc in the next shipment. I’m just planning an evening wine social to help draw extra customers.” He stepped back once he’d opened that week’s data entry screen and pulled out a binder full of the aforementioned order forms, which were admittedly not anywhere near as organized as they could be, then gestured for Leon to come around to look.

“It’s not enough hours for a salaried position but I’ll absolutely pay you more for this than just the lifting. I don’t actually know what minimum hourly wage is here but it was basically unlivable back home so we can at least double that. If you can look at this spreadsheet without screaming and running out of the store I’ll even buy you a celebratory Jameson after closing.” He really hoped that the minimum wage wasn’t actually absurdly high here. The staff he already had here were found by Alexis and he largely just signed off on what they were owed. Only Eleanor really worked there instead of just using the place to peddle her wares, anyway.

***

Screaming and running out of the store was pretty high on the things Leon wanted to do at the moment, but honestly, he thought it looked pretty straight forward, all-in-all, and once he got the initial load inputted, it probably wouldn’t take more than an hour or two a week. There was no way Leon wouldn’t have an extra hour or two in his week, and he’d always preferred to spend what free time he had working. Except for those two years when he’d spent almost every free moment in D’s shop - including his lunch hours and breakfast hours, assuming Leon’s shift started late enough in the day that D would be awake - but given that he’d been investigating him for murder, that was practically like he’d been working. At least, that’s what Leon told himself.

“Trust me, if you had me dealing with the general public, you’d be losing money,” Leon said. “Anyway, I guess I’ll be joining one of the Defense Teams, so anything that would involve regular hours is a no-go. This I assume I can do whenever I have a couple free hours?” he asked. “Depending what time your Tuesday shipments arrive, I can come before or after my shifts with the DOA, but it looks like it’s shift work so I should have most of my Tuesdays free.”

He pulled up a seat behind the computer, took another glance at the order forms and the Excel sheet, and then began to enter the information, pecking at the keyboard with his index fingers. “Like this?” he asked.

***

As long as Leon had an outlet for keeping himself sane and wasn’t planning to devote that much time to this job, that was fine by David. All that data entry would drive anyone crazy after long enough. Even Patrick, who seemed to almost enjoy paperwork, would inevitably look up from his spot seated at the counter a few hours after closing while David kept busy neatening the shelves and pop off those stupid little rubber finger caps he insisted on wearing to turn the pages before commenting something about just how badly he needed to get as far away from Excel as possible.

“I’ve been here for like two months and I still don’t even know half of what the defense teams even do, but I’m sure that should be… fun for you? More fun than this?” He rambled, a bit distractedly. The chair that Leon had pulled up was, in fact, one that Patrick had often used, and the sight of someone sitting in it while trying to suffer through some of Patrick’s duties made something twist a little uncomfortably in David. So maybe there was a reason he hadn’t actually tried to hire anyone to take over that particular aspect of running the store and instead chose to suffer through it himself until now. He hadn’t actually realized there was a reason, but it sure as shit was there!

The sight of Leon hunting and pecking at the keyboard thankfully yanked him out of those particular thoughts, and he couldn’t help but burst out laughing even as he stumbled forward to take a look at the screen so he could answer his question. “Oh my god, yeah, I mean the entry part is like that, you’ve got that fine but what are you doing with your hands?! You look like my dad! Do I need to get you Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing??”

***

Leon’s face turned a rather brilliant shade of pink. He knew that maybe he wasn’t the best typist - he never did learn how to do that thing that Jill did where she managed to type with all ten of her fingers - but he wasn’t awful at it. He, at least, knew where all the keys on the keyboard was, so he didn’t even need to search that hard - just had to glance at the keyboard, maybe, to make sure his finger landed in the right place - whereas detectives like Haddon and Marks could spend upwards of 30 seconds looking for keys like q and z. And sure, he’d used computers since he quit the force - the internet had been a great resource for finding out where D had set up shop, and it was how he’d managed to find him in Tokyo - but he mostly only used them in internet cafes a couple times a week.

“There’s nothing wrong with how I type,” Leon snapped. “I mean, I don’t spend my whole life on computers or anything, so it’s only natural.”

***

David bit back more laughter because he really wasn’t meaning to embarrass the poor guy so often. He hadn’t even meant to sound like he was outright making fun of him, but it had certainly come out that way. It was just funny. It was inherently funny, and that couldn’t be helped.

“No, you’re- you’re really not that bad at it. I swear you’re way better at typing than my seventy year old father.” He should probably quit while he was ahead, because that was definitely still just straight up making fun of him.

“It’s just, you know, people learn that in grade school now? It’s not even a computer nerd thing, it's just an everyone thing?” He cleared his throat and tried one more time to make this better in terms of Leon’s humiliation while probably just making it even worse. “It’s kind of cute! Doddering old man cute, but you can own it!”

***

“Yeah, well, they sure as hell didn’t teach it in grade school in the 70s and 80s,” Leon snapped. They’d taught it in high school, but Leon had never been the best student in high school. He’d been more focused on sports, and girls, and helping out his mom, and he’d been happy enough with keeping his grades just high enough that he didn’t get kicked off any of the varsity teams.

David really wasn’t making it any better, and Leon, somehow, was turning more red. His scalp, at this point, was probably a nice shade of red. “If you’re so good at typing, let’s see you do it!”

***

“No, I know. There’s people here from like the 1800s, it’s not that weird to be behind the times but…” Leon was a blonde tomato by this point, and David had suffered through enough mortifying things in his life that he could commiserate. Really, he could. He’d had moments where he’d considered just how plausible it would be to climb under a literal rock and wait to die. But it was still funny. Especially how flustered he was getting about it. “The fact that it’s also funny to watch someone from the 1800s try to use a smartphone doesn’t make this not funny.”

At that little challenge the guilt he was feeling amidst all that second hand embarrassment faded, and he couldn’t help something of a smirk as he sidled over and bent forward to reach the keyboard without stealing the chair. He entered a few of the necessary numbers without taking his eyes off of the order forms themselves, not so much as a glance at either the screen or the keys he was quickly tapping away at. That was boring, though, and no way to show off, so instead he tabbed out of Excel to open up youtube and went swiftly through about twelve different searches in less than 30 seconds, before finally settling on the results for ‘dog head tilt’. He opened one of a particularly confused looking labrador retriever and pointed at the video when it opened.

“That’s you, trying to find the ampersand key.” He turned his gaze to Leon, putting on a very overly bright smile, because when it suited him he was nothing if not a snarky bitch. “It’s the same key as 7. You have to hold shift.”

***

Leon had known the challenge was a bad idea the moment he’d issued it - yet another case of Leon’s mouth beating his brain to the punch - and he sat in embarrassed silence, hand covering the lower half of his face, as David put him to shame.

He hadn’t been able to help actually looking for the ampersand key when David mentioned it, and he hadn’t managed to find it before David told him where it was. He kind of hoped David hadn’t seen him looking, but he was pretty sure that he out of luck there.

There really was no winning this, but that didn’t mean Leon wasn’t going to try. “Yeah? Well, I’d like to see you use a rotary phone sometime. Let’s see who’s laughing then!” The last rotary phone Leon had seen was in D’s shop, and it had been old-fashioned even then.

***

Yeah, David definitely had seen that quick glance at the keyboard at the mention of the ampersand, and while he did openly laugh, there wasn’t any malice in it. He liked when people tried to call him on his crap, and the longer he’d had Stevie and Patrick- people who did just that, several times a day, like it was their job- the more he had stopped caring when they were right. It was still super satisfying when he was the one who was right, but he was learning to just roll with embarrassment too. This was good for Leon. The fact that it was also hilarious for David was just a plus.

“It’s really sweet that you can look at me and not see the type of person who went through a six week phase of using only a rotary landline in high school because it was more dramatic than my flip phone.” He raised his eyebrows as if daring him to challenge this fact, still smirking through his laughter. It was, indeed, a fact. David’s life had consisted of many weird phases, and that really was one of them.

It was very doubtful he would actually be good at using a rotary phone, though. High school was over half his life away at this point, and he hadn’t even been terribly good at using the thing at the time. There were multiple reasons said phase had only lasted six weeks, and just being bad at dialing had been one of them. The other reasons were teenage hormones and Becky Wilkins from his second period physics class calling his boarding school dorm room to tell him that after nearly twelve whole hours of dating, she wanted to break up. He hadn’t really cared that much, in the grand scheme, about Becky Wilkins, but the rotary phone had been very suitably dramatic to smash at the time.

***

Now that David had mentioned it, Leon could see it. And now, he was wondering if the only reason D had had a rotary phone in the mid-90s was for the drama of it. Sure, it had matched the whole Count D’s Petshop vibe of elegance and and grace, with uncomfortable but beautiful couches and the clawed tables and the oh-so-whimsical domed, wire bird cages, but it had also fit as a mildly creepy goth aesthetic. Kind of a classic Addam’s Family feel. The kind of atmosphere that had Leon questioning, when he first met D, whether or not the D stood for Dracula.

D had pulled it off - the make-up, the classic, Chinese dresses, the painted claws for fingernails that he’d lose his mind over when he broke them - effortlessly, naturally, in a way that it had taken Leon over a decade to recognize, but somehow, he suspected that David hadn’t been quite so graceful in it. He glanced at David’s black skinny jeans, and then he grinned.

“Oh my god,” Leon said, embarrassment suddenly and completely gone. “You were a goth weren’t you? Come on, don’t deny it. You were definitely walking around in the fishnet tops, with all that heavy eyeliner and black lipstick. I can totally see it. Did you wear platform boots? Please, please tell me you wore platform boots.”

***

So the tables had turned, but it could, honestly, have been worse. Of course David had a goth phase in high school. It was a phase that had lasted longer than his others, apart from the more ‘punk’ years the goth stuff had evolved right into, and aspects of both still bled into his wardrobe well over a decade after his high school graduation. They were far from the worst of his phases. At least Leon hadn’t somehow had a glimpse at his past to reveal that summer during college when he’d gotten really into rave culture.

He wasn’t really ashamed of it, but he did still respond to the outright teasing for it exactly the way that Leon had probably been aiming for. Namely with the overblown offense mixed with self deprecation that he frequently employed as a very thin cover for embarrassment. “Look at me. Of course I was a goth.” He said a bit snappily as he straightened up and away from the computer, waving down at his outfit- all black but for the white accents on the shoes and shirt.

“Do you think I don’t wear eyeliner because I’m worried about looking effeminate? I own over twelve skirts. No, I don’t wear eyeliner because I spent too many years scribbling it around my eyes like a kid with a crayon who doesn’t know how to color in the lines and irritating the shit out of my corneas. I look at a stick of eyeliner now and my eyes start welling up, it’s Pavlovian.” He wasn’t doing it consciously, but he was employing one of his most tried and true defense mechanisms by making fun of himself as thoroughly as he possibly could before someone else could truly beat him to it. “I still own platform boots. I owned several pairs back home but so far it’s just the one pair here. They are about 90% zippers and buckles.”

***

Leon howled, less so now because he was laughing at David, and more because he figured he was laughing with David - the Pavlovian line was an especially good one. Leon had never learned the subtle art of self-deprecating humour to avoid getting made fun of. He'd been popular in high school, the kind of full-blown jock who got into fights with bullies. Things had changed when he'd hit adulthood - he'd fallen out of touch with pretty much all his high school friends as soon as his parents had died and had never bothered making new ones, and he reacted poorly to being teased, which often just made people either tease him harder or back off. It probably was good for him to have people to give him a good old-fashioned ribbing every once in a while, but he'd never admit it.

Either way, he figured that if David was making fun of himself, it was probably fine. And maybe it wasn't funny enough for the tears that formed at the edges of Leon's eyes, but he hadn't really had much cause to laugh since before D had left. He wiped a tear from his eye with the back of his hand. "I hope by 'here' you mean 'here in this shop,'" he managed, somehow, to wheeze out once he'd managed to get the laughter more under control. "Because those sound amazing."

***
David’s high school experience was… not like that. He wasn’t a loser, really, but the fact that his parents had shelled out for only the best private schools also meant that not even his wealth had been an easy ticket to a shallow friend group. He didn’t see himself as outright bullied, not the way his mother liked to insist he was, but he was weird and a little neurotic and people did absolutely make fun of him. He’d never really fit in, not during school, and not during his adult life up until Schitt’s Creek. The people there had still seen him as weird and a little neurotic, but they fully accepted him for it. So far he mostly felt like Vallo was the same, but he was still a little bit hesitant to fully trust it.

So it maybe took him a second to realize that he was no longer being laughed at, but the frown that managed to make its way onto his face had shifted to a somewhat shy lopsided smile by the time Leon was practically peeing himself at the pavlovian comment. It was a little embarrassing, but in a good way. He knew that people who thought he was funny existed in the world. Stevie thought he was funny, he knew that, but Stevie very rarely showed amusement in such an open way. She was more like him in that way, all snide grins and eyerolls. So it was weird, but it wasn’t exactly bad?

“Sadly, no, I haven’t resorted to keeping parts of my wardrobe in the stockroom yet, even if the closet is probably going to stop closing soon. By here I mean Vallo and not the motel in Schitt’s Creek I was living in before. Maybe I’ll wear them next Tuesday, if you think you’re going to show up to work again after I bullied you about your typing.”

***

Leon stared open-mouthed, not quite able to believe his ears. He had to have heard wrong, right?

"I'm sorry, a motel in where?" he asked.

***

Right. David had spent long enough living there that the name had become almost normalized for him, but he knew exactly how ridiculous it still sounded. “Schitt’s Creek.” He repeated, clearly amused about it too now that he’d been reminded that he should be. “Yes, like up it without a paddle. No, I’m not joking. It’s a real town that my dad bought me for my birthday when I was a kid.”

He was also aware that most kids didn’t get towns for their birthdays, but it was the truth and he’d never bothered trying to hide his previous wealth with anyone, so why start now? “Then the IRS took everything but the town and my family was allowed to keep it because who else would have wanted it?” This had been traumatic at the time, but now? He could and did laugh about it.

“So that’s the abbreviated story about how I went from living in a $35,000 a month penthouse in SoHo to sharing a complimentary motel room in the ass end of nowhere with my sister, literally overnight. Our parents were in the adjoining room, if you want to complete that mental picture.”

***

Leon still hadn't quite recovered from the last bout of laughing, and while he was mildly pissed that David had said without a paddle before Leon has had a chance to, he still started laughing. He tried to stop himself when David talked about how he and his family had lost everything, because that wasn't funny, except for the fact that David was laughing too, which didn't help. He gave up entirely by the time David was talking about sharing a hotel room with his sister, complete with an adjoining room with his parents, and at that point, he was laughing so hard he had tears streaming down his face, and then he laughed himself right out of the chair, which of course only made him, somehow, laugh harder, an elbow on the seat the only thing keeping him from collapsing entirely.

"Oh fuck," Leon said after he finally had himself under enough control to speak. He wiped the tears from his face. "My stomach hurts. That's the funniest," he paused, grinned, "Schitt I've ever heard."

Maybe not, but it was the hardest Leon had laughed since he'd been a young teenager having uncontrollable, infectious giggle fits under the sheets with Harry when they'd had sleepovers.

***

Leon’s laughter was already a bit out of control, in David’s humble opinion, before he’d even managed to fall out of the chair. The trouble was, it was also kind of contagious and he found himself outright giggling with the kind of childish abandon he’d usually reserved for those occasions when he and Stevie found weed in one of the motel rooms and very reasonably decided it was completely up for grabs.

“Oh my god, get off the floor, the store is open! I could have to deal with a customer at literally any moment!” He tried to sound suitably cross, because it seriously would be mortifying if a customer happened to walk in right then, but his orders were probably hard to take seriously when he was also laughing so hard that he had to brace himself on the checkout counter. Because the idea of a customer walking in was actually so mortifying that it sort of rounded the bend and came back to hilarious.

***

“Okay okay okay,” Leon said, gesturing his hand like he was attempting to pat the laughter back down. He took a deep breath. “Okay, I think I got it now,” he said, climbed to his feet, and then immediately let out a loud snort as his laughter escaped from him again. At least this time he managed to hold himself up by the counter instead of winding up on the floor again.

***

“Jesus, do I need to fire you before I’ve even officially hired you?” David hissed as he raised a hand up over his mouth, as if by doing so he could somehow physically hold his own laughter back from escaping. This wasn’t even laughing at a particular thing anymore, it was just laughing at the idea of laughing itself.

The bell rang at that moment, signalling that the door had just opened, and David immediately bolted into an upright position from where he’d been bent over the counter and actually full on clapped the hand that had just been over his mouth onto his lips. The customer, a middle aged gentleman who was not a regular, stopped, took one look at David’s very rigid posture, the wild look in his eyes, and what David figured might look like a homeless person still struggling to regain composure next to him, and then backed right back out the door.

The shout of “FUCK!” that escaped David’s mouth the second he uncovered it again barely managed to make itself heard before his entire torso collapsed back onto the counter in yet another bout of hysterics.

***

It was too much, and Leon gave up the fight entirely as David swore, his knees giving out under him, and then he was holding himself up entirely with his upper body strength, slapping the counter, laughing so hard that he wasn’t even making any noise anymore. He struggled for breath, and he wondered if this is how it felt to be dying. It was downright painful, but not necessarily in a bad way.

“I swear,” Leon said, once he was able to fill his lungs with enough air to make noise again. He snorted, giggled for another thirty seconds, and then tried again. “I swear I’m not normally like this,” he finally managed, his words coming out in a quick jumble as if he were forcing them out before the next wave of laughter came.

That seemed to do it though. His shoulders still shook with silent giggles, but he could, at least, breath again. He let out almost a relieved sounding sigh, and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Oh fuck,” he said. “I haven’t laughed like that since I was thirteen.” Look at him go, with the complete, uninterrupted sentences and everything! “Shit, I’m not even sure if I’ve laughed at all in the last decade. Ow.”

***

If it had gone on much longer, David would probably have had to duck behind the curtain into the stockroom just to get control of himself. This would, of course, have left Leon alone in the technically still open store if another customer happened in, so it was a very good thing that the outright fit started to pass before it came to that. His breathing was still a little shaky, like he hadn’t quite quelled the laughter, but the worst was over with.

“I’m normally very good at the art of a smirk or an eyeroll to show amusement.” He responded when he too could finally breathe again, and straightened up from where he’d fallen all over the counter. He looked down at his rumpled sweater and made an audible ‘tsk’ noise as he started trying to smooth it out.

“I haven’t laughed like that since my friend Stevie and I stole weed from this gross townie that was staying at the motel and I belatedly realized I had also stolen his fucking trucker hat because it was still on my head.” He responded matter-of-factly, because he honestly couldn’t even say that he’d laughed like that when was thirteen. He hadn’t been one to laugh much at all when he was a kid. Kind of came with the territory of meeting your first real friend when you’re already over thirty. “I haven’t even toyed with the idea of working out since I got to Vallo, but I feel like my abs should not hurt this much.”

***

Leon frowned. It wasn’t a very good frown, since his eyes were still shining and his face still held its rosy glow, but it was still very much a frown. You could take the man out of the police, but you couldn’t take the police out of the man. To his credit, he actually thought about whether or not he wanted to make a Thing out of the whole ‘stealing drugs and then doing drugs, marijuana is illegal’ situation, and then, after some consideration, decided that he did not. He was feeling unexpectedly light of spirit right now, more so than he had in years, and he didn’t want to immediately ruin it.

“I do workout every day, and my abs still hurt,” he said instead, collapsing back into the chair.

***

David noticed that frown. He’d lived through the same eras that Leon had, even if he was considerably younger during those years. So he could guess what it was about, even if Leon didn’t outright say it in favor of focusing on the talk about abs. He could have ignored it in favor of continuing to talk about abs and working out, but chose not to.

“The whole war on drugs thing, mhm?” He couldn’t help but let out a short laugh, much less hysterical than their previous laughter, and a little bit hard. The humor wasn’t really there anymore. “I took D.A.R.E., same as everyone else. I may technically be a law breaker, but it was on its way to legal back home and it’s apparently legal here. We might start stocking some edibles here at the store, along with the wine.”

This was maybe a tiny bit of a test. He’d never been full on addicted to anything, but he’d tried basically everything under the sun. It just came with the territory of the upbringing he’d had and the social circles he’d been in during his time in New York.

***

Leon scowled. “I was just going to let it drop,” Leon snapped, which would might have given D a heart attack because ten years ago, Leon would have never let anything drop - he’d tried okay? “But doing drugs is illegal and stealing drugs is def - in - itely -” He stopped suddenly as his brain caught up to his mouth, and then he blinked, tilting his head to the side. “What do you mean, it’s legal here?”

***

David was making a few snap judgements, and was well on his way toward retreating from any possibility of friendship there might have been here. The very genuine question about legality absolutely broke that decision, however. He was still a little pissed off, feeling a little irrationally judged for things that he hadn’t even admitted to, but a snort escaped him anyway.

“You can buy it at 18. It’s like buying cigarettes or alcohol.” He responded, a little amused again despite himself. “Have you seriously never smoked a joint? Are you that devoted to the letter of the law?”

***

“I might have spent the last ten years doing the whole ‘travelling the world’ thing, but I spent the eight years before that as a cop, and my dad was a cop before that, so you’d better bet your ass that I’m that dedicated to the law.” Nevermind the fact that most of his jobs for the last ten years had been under-the-table cash jobs that he didn’t pay taxes on - he’d never stayed in any one country long enough to feel guilty about that - or the fact that one of the reasons he’d quit being a cop in the first place was because he couldn’t get the idea that maybe, just maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if D did succeed in the whole ‘destruction of humanity’ thing.

“And no, I’ve never smoked a joint in my life.” He’d started smoking in middle school, and had started drinking in high school, but he was pretty sure his dad would have actually arrested him if he’d started doing drugs.

***

All of that was completely understandable, but it was also complete bullshit, at least in David’s opinion. He wasn’t going to outright say that, but…

“Okay. All I’m going to say is that I dated a girl in the FBI for three weeks in my twenties and she absolutely had the best quality weed I’ve ever smoked. She got it from some guy in narcotics.” He had graduated back to full on amused, and couldn’t really help the half smile on his face. “I’m not going to say you should try it now that it’s legal, because any kind of pressure is horrible, but I will say that if you did choose to do so you might have some fun.”

Even as he said this, he remembered the last time he’d smoked, right after he’d put in the application for the store. “Or you might just get really paranoid and make yourself look like an idiot. It really could go either way.”

***

Leon scowled harder, somehow. “Cops who break the laws they’re supposed to be enforcing are bigger scumbags than the people they arrest,” Leon grumbled. Cops should be held to a higher standard of the law than the people they arrested, not a lower standard. As far as drug crimes went, Leon had always considered marijuana on the lower scale of things, especially if the dealers were growing their own product - less people got exploited like they did with harder drugs and a lot less people died because of it. He’d never gone looking for people who smoked or dealed weed, but that didn’t mean he was going to smoke a joint on Monday and then arrest someone for doing the exact same thing on Tuesday.

He wondered, absently, if people died at all because of marijuana now that it was legal; almost all the deaths before had been because it was illegal, but that particular train of thought seemed like it was going to take him somewhere dangerous, so he stopped himself from going too far down it.

“I’ll… think about it,” he said after a moment. It was a pretty big think.

***

That was… actually a completely fair point to make. David was used to most of the world, cops included, being hypocrites. He flat out expected people to say one thing and do another. That was just the way the world worked. Cops did drugs when they weren’t arresting people for doing exactly the same, just like his boarding school dorm parents had confiscated any contraband they found and had parties with it on the weekends. So it was actually a little jarring to be confronted by someone who seemed to sincerely believe that enforcing rules should mean following them. Jarring, but not bad. “You’re not wrong.” He said finally, a little less flippantly than his previous gentle teasing had been.

“And Jesus, you don’t have to think about it!” He added quickly, because he was starting to feel like he was committing fucking peer pressure. “Do it or don’t do it! Do what you want! You’re kind of making me feel like the bully in an after school special.”

***

Leon relaxed a little. If he cared to think about it, there was probably a reason why he'd been a cop for eight years and the closest thing he'd come to making an actual friend in the department had been Jill, who'd only been his partner for the last year of it - and he suspected she was more fascinated with his investigation of D than anything - but Leon didn't think about it very often, especially since it wasn't like he'd been out to make friends in the first place.

He snorted, and turned back to the computer. "Listen, no one alive is going to make me do something I don't want to do." He frowned, tilting his head. "Is it legal in the States? I'm from California."

Just because he hadn't been in America for ten years didn't mean that he wasn't still an American citizen; marijuana had been legal in Amsterdam too, but he hadn't smoked it then either.

***

“Good. I don’t want to be that person who offers you a joint only for you to very unrealistically end up an addict in a gutter a week later.”

Most of the humor had already fled the conversation, and David was fully willing to admit that he’d been the one to cause that, but between his own absurd statement, that question, and the mention of California specifically… He did let out another genuine laugh. “On its way to legal everywhere when I’m from, and California was one of the first to make it legal ‘medicinally’.”

***

“Then I’ll consider it.” Because really, if it was legal then there probably wasn’t any harm in it. He’d heard horror stories of Things Marijuana Did, and his dad had made him watch Reefer Madness in middle school in some misguided attempt to scare him, but he had been a teenager in the 80s, and then a cop afterward, and he’d never seen any evidence that supported… whatever it was Reefer Madness had been attempting to say would happen.

“Now, can I finish this,” he gestured at the computer and the order form, “or are you gonna make another crack about my typing?”

***

David may have been a tinge worried that he’d scared Leon away. Both from the idea of working at the store and from him, specifically, as a human being. He was A Lot, basically a human roller coaster, and he fully knew that. If Leon had gotten up and left, he would have entirely understood. So it was a nice bit of reassurance when he went back to the computer like the entire last awkward ten or so minutes hadn’t happened.

“I will not comment on your typing, but if you’re still here by Christmas I can’t promise you won’t be getting Mavis Beacon as a gift.” Even as he talked, he made a point of busying himself with more shelf organization. He wasn’t outright saying that he hoped Leon still being around in a few months was a thing, but the implication was there. Friendships were few and far between for David, and this was the first time in a long time that he’d felt like he wanted to keep one.