WHAT: Leon has some concerns about Goose, and Carol makes introductions WHERE: Carol's place WHEN: Last week sometime WARNINGS: Language, some talk about cannibalism and man-eating animals STATUS: Complete
There was a point in his life where Leon knew better than to make prolonged eye-contact with animals. In the days before he could talk to animals, he was more conscious of that stuff. Hell, even in the days before he’d ended up a regular in D’s shop – he’d often had stare downs with T-Chan back in those days. It had usually ended with him sporting a new set of teeth marks, but that had never really stopped him.
He couldn’t talk to animals anymore, even if James thought he might be able to again. But that didn’t mean that he was above staring down this “cat.” Or Flicken. Flounken. Whatever the hell it was called. He took a sip from his beer. Goose seemed, mostly, uninterested.
Maybe it was mean, but Carol thought the fear of Goose she’d inflicted on Leon was hilarious. The post she’d made a while back, after Goose’s scare with one freaked out kid, was meant half-seriously, half-jokingly, but only Leon had really taken it to the extreme fear side. So, now, she needed to cure that.
That didn’t mean it wasn’t still funny watching him squirm.
She smirked around her own beer — an alien variety, since the human variety did nothing for her — and shook her head as she watched Leon stare her cat down. Sure, Goose was technically an alien that just happened to resemble a cat, but she was a cat in every way that really counted.
“Let her sniff your hand,” she told him.
“Why, so she can have a treat?” Leon asked, quirking an eyebrow. Nevertheless, he held his hand out for the cat Flerken to sniff. Despite his trepidation, he’d spent two years with D, letting all sorts of animals crawl around on him. He didn’t know how many of them actually ate people, and at this point he figured it was probably better he didn’t know.
Carol smirked at him but watched as he went ahead and put his hand out, anyway. Goose leaned forward, sniffing him curiously for a long while, had to be a good fifteen seconds. Then she leaned back, evaluated him, and finally extended a front paw herself, placing it in the palm of his hand.
“Oooh, scary,” Carol laughed. “What’s your next move, Detective?”
Obviously if something put their paw in his hand, the only reaction was to close his hand gently around it and give it a shake. He still frowned a little as he did it, and then glared at Carol.
“I’m not a detective anymore,” Leon said automatically, before he could stop himself. “Make fun of me all you want, but you can’t blame me for being cautious. Where’d you even get something like this – like her – in the first place?”
He wasn’t going to ask if it was from Count D’s Petshop, even if that was the first place his mind went.
Carol was really just harassing him because she could, but she did understand her caution. Even if she hadn’t made an ordeal of what Goose was and to watch yourself in that post, she was an alien and she could certainly be dangerous. He was right to be cautious, but his over-the-top reactions were what was getting her.
And referring to Goose as ‘it’. She hadn’t liked that one fucking book.
“I’m afraid that’s classified,” she replied with a playful smirk. “Let’s just say she’s much older than she looks. She belonged to my mentor, way back in the day.”
Leon frowned at the not-cat before he turned his attention back to Carol, unconsciously giving Goose ear scritches as he turned his attention away. He’d spent enough time with animals crawling all over him that the reaction was nearly as ingrained into him as breathing, at this point.
“Does she come with some sorta, I don’t know, care sheet or something? You know, don’t let her get hungry, never feed her after midnight, that sorta thing?”
Goose seemed to have deemed Leon acceptable and began to purr while he scritched behind her ears. She inched closer to him but just to settle into meatloaf position, eyes falling closed. Terrifying.
“Nah, but she’s not all that different from a regular cat. More extensive diet, and I don’t mean people, but that’s about it. Aside from the tentacles, but she doesn’t really use them unless she’s feeling threatened,” Carol explained.
A horrifying meatloaf beast, really, her ferocity showcased all-the-more as Leon stroked the length of her body without losing any limbs.
“D, back home, he’d sell people animals with contracts. You know, don’t expose it to sunlight, don’t let it get hungry, don’t feed it anything other than fruits and vegetables. Don’t show it to anyone else was a big one. And inevitably, someone would fuck up somehow, and then thing would get hungry, and then I’d get called in to investigate a half-eaten corpse. I’m starting to get real fucking sick of coming across half-eaten corpses, Carol.”
The Cannibal Frat Boy Party, with its buffet table filled with human body parts, hadn’t exactly helped matters in that regard.
Carol’s brows lifted. Well, that was unexpected. She remembered Leon making a comment about corpses before, but she’d thought he was annoyed and being dramatic. That clearly wasn’t the case here. It was no wonder he was all up in arms if this D guy and his fucked up animals were killing people constantly.
She was sure his recent adventure in the Fuckboy House of Horrors hadn’t made that any better. She’d watched enough of it to know it had to be its own unique kind of hell, even if there was some entertaining aspect from an outside point-of-view.
“How was he getting away with that?” she asked, her tone softening from the teasing sarcasm she’d been using on Leon since he walked through her front door.
Leon waved his hands. “A perfect storm of shit. There was never enough evidence. He had contracts that released him from any liability if the owners didn’t follow his instructions. He had connections to the Chinese mafia, and Chinatown had some weird jurisdictional bullshit that stopped me from getting any support from the police force. And…” He shrugged. “Things back home, they’re not like they are here, where magic’s just out in the open and everyone believes in that shit. D… D’s not human, and while I knew in my gut he was responsible, none of it added up logically. People didn’t talk to animals, and the only way I thought people would think animals were people was if there were drugs involved, but I could never find any hard evidence of drug use. Pretty sure everyone in my department thought I’d lost my damn mind, right up until the FBI came and got involved.”
“Huh.” Maybe not the most intelligent response, but she had never really thought about what Leon’s world might be like. She knew vaguely about this mysterious ‘D’, but to be honest, a lot of that she’d thought was a euphemism for dick — how could she not. Obviously, it was much more serious than that, and it almost sounded alien. She didn’t deal in the more street-level alien matters, generally, but D absolutely sounded shady.
“What made the FBI finally get involved?” She was intrigued now because he was right. If magic and aliens and whatnot weren’t a known problem in his universe, she was sure law enforcement had struggled to connect the dots. She was surprised a federal agency had stepped in and involved themselves at all — unless it was just a cover story for more discreet agencies, like S.H.I.E.L.D. and S.W.O.R.D. back home, the D.E.O. in younger Danvers’ world.
A range of emotions flicked across Leon's face, and he realized that he hadn't actually talked about that night with anyone outside of his official report to his superiors; a report that they'd likely discredited due to shock. He'd lost a lot of blood that night, had been the only survivor of the explosion that, as far as anyone knew, had hurtled him out of the upper story floors of a massive high rise. It had been a wonder he'd survived at all, and while they might have believed him about a jungle filled to the brim with predators – the wounds he'd received had been real enough, and they'd found some remains – he doubted they'd paid any attention to flying ships or any of the rest.
"Agent Vesca Howell," Leon said. "He'd gone to college with D's old man. I don't know what happened between them, exactly, but I know that Daddy D had apparently been working on a biological weapon of some sort. Howell had joined the FBI twenty years earlier so he could find him after he'd disappeared. He got my D mixed up with his. They're…" he waved a hand. "You know anything about asexual reproduction, or like… apoximis or anything?" He didn't wait for an answer. "It's when plants produce seeds without any outside fertilization. It results in a genetic clone, or something close to it. There were differences in the Ds, but nothing immediately noticeable. Different temperaments, different hair styles, their eyes were a little different."
And his D had a heart condition that he thought the other Ds were missing. He'd tried to look a little into genetics and stuff afterward, but he'd never done very well in science. He just knew that sometimes genetic weaknesses were amplified if new genetic material wasn't introduced. "So my D wound up on national television and Howell came running. Howell didn't have any more idea of what was going on than I did – less, I think. I don't know how he convinced the FBI that D was worth looking into, either. Maybe national patterns were less easily ignored than local ones. Either way, he looked for his D for twenty-years, and when he finally found him they died together."
He wondered if that would have been his fate if he'd ever found his D. He wanted to hope not. He also wanted to hope that he wouldn't have looked for his D for twenty-years, but he'd been on year ten when he wound up in Vallo, and at that point he wasn't anywhere close to giving up.
Ah, that made more sense. She could imagine someone with a personal stake jumping right into it and using their status as a federal agent to get away with it. Not that it didn’t sound worth investigating - she’d seen asexual reproduction out there in the galaxies she traveled, in some of the more advanced species who’d either learned how to make it a reality or simply evolved in that direction.
“Glad you didn’t wind up like Agent Howell,” she offered. “I’ve dealt with clones before but not like that. Either way, it’s a pain in the ass, and I’m sorry that’s a mess you got tangled up in.”
“Yeah,” Leon said, though distantly. He didn’t know if he was sorry for it. He hated that he’d given up everything he’d ever known, his job, the few friends he’d had, any sort of security or shelter so he could sleep under bridges around the world for ten years, only to end up here in Vallo with nothing to show for it, but most of his regret was because he’d ended up in Vallo. He liked it here now – he liked getting to spend time with Adora and Catra, who were nearly like sisters, and he liked having other friends to spend time with, he loved James; Vallo was his home now, as much as LA had been. But he didn’t regret actually chasing after D. He didn’t regret getting tangled up with D in the first place. He thought, sometimes, that he’d changed D. There’d certainly been less murders that Leon had lain at D’s feet once Chris had moved in with the petshop owner, and he didn’t think he’d imagined the tears on D’s face when he’d said good-bye. He liked to think that maybe, just maybe, he’d managed to convince D that not all of humanity was worthy of destruction.
Then again, maybe he was just full of shit.
He realized, belatedly, that he’d been navel gazing and snapped his attention back to the present.
“Anyway, you can see why I’m not exactly gung-ho about having this,” he paused, scowling, looking for the word, “Fucken running around unattended,” he said. “How many people has she eaten anyway?”
“Flerken, Leon,” Carol corrected him with an exasperated sigh. She knew it was a weird one, but it wasn’t that difficult of a word. He was just being stubborn, despite Goose putting on her halo and angel wings in his presence. She had even been purring, nudging into his hand for more pets. “She’s eaten some enemies from time to time, but it’s been a long time. I was overexaggerating.” Slightly.
“Same diff,” Leon muttered. And look at the fucken flerken hamming it up, demanding pets as if it would make Leon forget that she ate people with mouth tentacles like some sort of cat-shaped cthulhu. He gave her a suspicious glare, and then scritched under her chin.
“Yeah, alright,” Leon said, not quite convinced. “Nothing I could do about it even if you weren’t,” he added reluctantly. Not unless he actively caught her eating people, and that seemed unlikely just now.