WHAT: Leon's surprise girlfriend from another dimension shows up and immediately starts causing trouble WHERE: The Rusty Nail, a divebar in downtown Vallo WHEN: This evening WARNINGS: Violence STATUS: Complete NOTES: Leon and Revy are absolutely going to be stumbling into the DOA at some point tonight, shitfaced, to get Revy settled in, so feel free to volunteer for the poor DOA person who has to deal with them.
Revy had finished taking a piss. Literally just pulled up her shorts and buttoned them up (the fly was open, who cares) and was about to turn around and practice basic hygiene by washing her goddamn hands when she blinked up and realized this suddenly wasn’t her bathroom anymore?
She was… on a sidewalk??
The water-stained ceiling tiles were gone. Leon’s annoying Bugs Bunny boxers weren’t by her feet all (why was that even in there, this wasn’t their fucking laundry basket), and it was dark. Street lamp lights were buzzing. Stores, restaurants, bars were lit up and open. This wasn’t New York City. She had no phone. No wallet. No guns. No cigarettes.
Then someone bumped into her, huffing out an indignant, “Hey, watch it.”
And she lost it.
“You fucking watch it!” she snarled and grabbed the poor, unsuspecting dude by the collar, lifting them off the ground by a mix of brute strength and slightly panicked rage. Revy slammed them into the brick wall. “Where the fuck am I?”
“Wait, lady, calm -”
“WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME, ASS LICKER??!”
He probably would have tried to answer that rationally if she didn’t punch him in the face.
Over, and over, and… over.
Leon didn’t get a lot of days off. It was his fault, really, and it was thanks to Adora that he had a day off now.
He probably should’ve been using it to pick up one of those hobbies that Adora had shown him in Catra’s notebook. He could have been using the evening to fix work on his car for the upcoming race, or anything else on the list of Every Hobby Ever, but Leon was happy enough spending the time alone at the bar, nursing his growing acceptance that he and James were officially done and that Colt, one of best friends here in Vallo, had been sent back to his murder mansion nightmare.
He likely would have spent the entire night there getting steadily more drunk (and then doing the long walk back to Morningside – he didn’t trust the Waypoints after his midnight run-in with poison ivy) if, from the street, hadn’t come some sort of commotion. Someone was screaming, other people were yelling, and Leon gave an annoyed huff, got up from his barstool, and stormed outside just in time to witness some woman beating some guy senseless. Whatever he’d done to deserve it – if he’d done anything – this was clearly overkill.
He caught her wrist as she pulled it back for another hit. “Jesus Christ, I don’t get paid enough for this. What the fuck’s going on here?”
“Who the -” Revy didn’t take kindly in getting grabbed and if she had the opportunity to argue her case, violence was a completely reasonable response to having the rug swept from underneath her feet. This had to be some kind of magic fuckery - they had literally moved to the east coast to get away from that shit, but this didn’t look like any street in California considering the dude she was punching was a fucking -
Troll? Looking? Dude? He wasn’t human. He was blue.
Her fists would have found a new target too if it weren’t for the fact that she knew this stupid goddamn face. The poor guy she was fighting with was dropped and landed on the concrete with a yelp and curse. “Holy shit, Leon.”
There was a delayed wait, he looks different thought that hit her brain after she grabbed him by the shoulders, yoinked him close so he could be pressed upon that plentiful bosom Revy knew he was fond as fuck of, and kissed him. Hard. It lasted for a few seconds before she pulled back and blinked.
Then she slapped him. “What the hell happened to YOUR FACE?!”
This wasn’t the first time a random woman in Vallo kissed him without warning – the first had been shortly after he arrived, when Alexei had mistaken him for Cullen – and he’d normally have ended the kiss before it got going, except she’d called him Leon. Even if his body had started responding after the first stunned second, returning the kiss, his brain needed another second to catch up.
It wasn’t quite there yet when she ended the kiss herself, and then slapped him. He cried out, an ouch more from surprise than pain, though holy shit this woman could pack a wallop and he’d be feeling that for a while, tears springing at the corners of his eyes.
“The fuck was that for?!” Leon demanded, not sure if he was talking about the kiss or the slap, but deciding that it was both. He gingerly rubbed his cheek. “What the fuck is wrong with my face?!”
“It’s - old???” Revy frowned, taking a chunk of his cheek to stretch out between her fingers. “Old-ish. This is some magic bullshit, isn’t it? Thought moving was gonna make us avoid this kind of crap but guess not, obviously something’s up. Who did this to you because I’m going to fucking destroy them after you buy me a drink.”
“Hey, lady!” shouted the troll on the ground, cupping his busted face with a scowl. “I’m not don -”
“Will you shut up and mind your damn business?? I’m in the middle of a conversation here with my dipshit boyfriend, rude ass. Where the hell are your manners?”
“You started hitting me!”
“You bumped into me and started it,” Revy seethed and pointed in some random direction. “Get out. I don’t wanna see your fuckin’ face ever again.”
This is how Catra must have felt the first time they’d met and he’d tried to pet her ears. He jerked back, pulling his face away from her pinching fingers, and regretted the fact that he neither had claws nor was willing to use them, even if he did.
Though, he realized belatedly, maybe that was for the best, given what this woman had done to the poor guy who’d … bumped into her. Christ. He should’ve stayed with his beer.
“It’s not so bad,” he said, flatly, to the troll. “Go to the clinic and they’ll be able to fix you up.” And then he sighed, and turned his attention back to the woman. The more she spoke, the more he was sure that she must have known one of his face twins. Maybe she hadn’t said Leon at all. “Look, lady, I think you’ve got the wrong guy. My name’s Leon Orcot.” He definitely wasn’t her boyfriend; he’d never seen her before in his life. Not even when he was younger. “And as much as I’d like to buy you a drink,” wait, why? “Your actual boyfriend would probably be pissed, so I should probably just bring you to the DOA.”
Revy’s frown deepened.
“Leon Orcot is my boyfriend,” she replied, unamused. The slew of cuss words took a short rest. Her eyes narrowed, scrutinizing him, drinking up every available detail. This was unmistakably Leon. He looked different - but not unrecognizable. She knew this face. It just wasn’t the face she had woken up to this morning.
Obviously - magical shitstorm was to blame but why and what kind were questions she knew fuck all to.
She slapped a hand over her face and sighed, aggravated. “We met in fucking - ugh, California. We moved to New York. You’re a detective, we fucking live together, I let you motorboat my tits on the reg. You’ve got a little brother and the whole Dr. Dolittle shit with animals except you see them as people because you’re weird - does any of this not ring a bell to you? I swear to god I’m gonna find the piece of shit that messed with your brain so I can fist them.”
Leon frowned, because yeah, almost all of that rang a bell – even if he’d only half paid attention to anything after motorboat my tits on the reg because those really were some great tits, and his mind had taken a bit of a detour to imagine what it would be like to maybe just… reach up and grab them. See what they felt like. Maybe stick his face between them.
He forcibly quashed that train of thought in order to focus on the task at hand, because no matter how much of that sounded familiar, he had definitely never stuck his face in those breasts before, and he’d never moved to New York with some woman, and…
And people were staring at them. Pretty much the whole crowd that gathered to watch her pummell the poor troll were now watching them, including the guy whose face was already starting to bruise, and frankly, Leon could use a drink. He probably should’ve been taking her to the DOA right now, but fuck it.
He grabbed her arm and pulled her into the bar.
“A double rum and coke,” Leon called to the bartender. “And whatever she’s having.” And then he grabbed his beer from the bar counter and found a corner booth for them to sit at.
“Alright, yeah, that sounds like me,” Leon said, grabbing his smokes and lighting one up. Thank god for dive bars. He held the open pack out to her in case she wanted a smoke too. “It sounds like you must’ve been dating some other version of me. That happens sometimes.” Like with Cullen – there’d been the one that wore flannel shirts and had dated Alexei, and then he’d taken off when she’d disappeared, and then a different version of him, this one with leather armour and a husband. “In my version of things, I took off after D. Travelled the world for ten years looking for him and ended up here after losing him in Japan.”
He assumed that there must’ve been a D in her world too. He couldn’t imagine how else he would have begun to talk to animals if it wasn’t for D.
Revy rolled with the punches in the same way she could dish them out - damn well near perfect. This situation was a whole different level of fucked. She let him talk, ordered a double shot of straight rum, and grabbed a cigarette to fire up while already vowing to take his entire pack for herself.
“All I did was piss in my own toilet and…” she trailed off, grumbling out loud (not necessarily at him) as she let the words sink in. Different version of Leon, she could handle that - she had experience with the whole alternate universe concept. This must be that. Fuck. Revy scrubbed a hand over her face. “Jesus shitfucking ballsucking Christ, yeah, you’re that Leon. Mine has memories about your life and your obsession with getting that dude’s D - it’s complicated. What the hell am I doing here, though? I was minding my own business.”
Then this. Revy gestured around them vaguely. “I’ve got no phone, no wallet, not even my guns and I feel naked.” It was a feeling that had nothing to do with her daisy dukes or top that barely held her tits back, that was just normal.
There was something about the idea of some other version out there dreaming about his life that made Leon’s skin crawl. He never dreamed about any other version of him’s life. That was creepy, right? Right. He frowned deeply at her, and didn’t quite manage to suppress the shudder that ran through him.
But his gaze softened a little. “I’ll take you to the DOA,” Leon said. “They’ll set you up with a cellphone and an apartment and some spending money to get you on your feet. Don’t think they’ll be setting you up with firearms though.”
And holy hell, it was probably lucky she hadn’t shown up with them, because things with that troll guy could’ve been so much worse.
“I’ll find my own damn guns,” Revy huffed, grabbing her glass to quickly knock back because she fucking needed it, even though she was a seasoned professional and the burn down her throat barely stung. There was no way in hell she was going to be in whatever this place was without some kind of weaponry, that’d be dumb. Her fists would suffice for the moment.
She had to double-down and get practical about this situation, though. Revy was capable of that. Sometimes. If anyone else had found her, she might still be raging but this whole weird shit thing where she was dealing with her boyfriend’s alternate self might have stunned her docile.
Fuck, she needed twelve more drinks. “How long am I stuck here? How long have you been stuck here? What the fuck am I supposed to do and how far does me holding someone at gunpoint get me?”
Leon blanched. “Holding someone at gunpoint isn’t going to get you anywhere,” Leon said firmly, wondering why, exactly, this alternative version of himself was dating a woman who thought what can I get by holding hostages was an imperative, top-five question when stuck in an alternative reality. Maybe it was the boobs. He’d been a sucker for nice breasts when he’d been in his twenties (now, older and wiser, he was, of course, totally immune and not at all distracted by this woman’s very tight shirt). “I’m not even saying that as a former cop. This place is crawling with superhero types. They’d deal with that sort of thing without breaking a sweat.
“As for the rest, I’ve been here for a year now. There’s no telling how long you’ll be stuck here though. Some people make it a couple weeks, and there are people who’ve been here years longer than me.”
A year. Years.
Revy could stomach a handful of weeks. She could trudge her way through whatever the fuck this place was called again and survive until her happy ass was brought back home. To her own apartment, where the furnace was faulty during winter and Steve’s tank was by a window (little shit loved that sunlight), and to a Leon that was hers despite constantly wanting to shove her foot up his sphincter.
And to know that it might take more than just a couple of goddamn weeks to get back to that?
She didn’t scream profanities. Didn’t let her first fly out to punch someone. Didn’t grab this Leon by the collar and threaten his babymakers. She calmly took a drag of her cigarette, slowly exhaled, grabbed her empty glass and -
Chucked it across the bar. It shattered, of course. Alarmed the whole lot of patrons around them. The bartender frowned at her. “Dude. You need to pay for that.”
“He’s paying for it,” Revy mumbled and gestured over to Leon before putting out the rest of her cigarette, then grabbing a second one from him, and then putting in an order for another drink. On his tab, obviously. “Can’t I just sleep on your couch? I know all your bad habits and I’ve seen you try the helicopter dick drunk. Unless this version of you has D hanging around and you’re mooning over him.”
“Jesus Christ,” Leon exclaimed, reaching too late for her arm. He pinched the bridge of his nose – he could already feel a headache coming on – but when the bartender shot him a questioning look, Leon nodded and waved a hand dismissively. Yes, he’d pay for it. Yes, the bartender better bring her another drink.
“No, there’s no D here,” Leon said, and after a moment, he sighed. “And yeah, you can crash on my couch. I just got dumped, so no one’s going to come for your spleen or anything. What’s your name, anyway?”
“Revy,” she answered, not feeling the need to introduce herself as Rebecca. That was a name she wished she’d take to the grave. The bartender delivered the second drink with a degree of wariness (as if he was afraid she’d toss the glass at him next) and she swiped it with a heavy fucking need. “I’ve seen you get dumped before - what stage of the grieving process are you on?”
Should she be jealous? No, that’d be dumb. But she kind of was, regardless - she always had a flare of possessiveness when it came to Leon so why wouldn’t that extend to this version?
This was going to be a complicated goddamn time.
Leon shrugged, knocking back the rest of his drink and gesturing to the bartender to refill it. “If your version of me is anything like… the me version of me,” Christ, what a headache, “then I doubt you’ve seen me get dumped like this before.”
The Leon in his twenties had dated lots of women. Models, mostly. Women that he had no real connection to, except he thought they were hot, and they thought he was hot, and then they screwed around for a couple weeks until they realized that he wasn’t what they wanted and they dumped him. He’d get sad for a couple days, maybe get wasted, and then he’d move on, water under the bridge.
“I guess I’m at the stage where I’ve accepted that it’s over and I should stop trying to win him back, so now it’s just booze and work. Which isn’t much different than the rest of the last six weeks have gone, but hopefully it’ll involve less unanswered drunk texts.”
So this was a serious relationship. Shit. Revy threw the second drink down the hatch, swished it around her mouth like damn mouthwash because she was a masochist, and swallowed it. She had only really known him while he had been dating Peggy and that was a blip, yeah, she remembered now - especially because he had avoided even telling her he was dating.
“Show me who the dumbfuck is,” she said, narrowing her eyes tightly. “You gotta have a picture, yeah? Don’t show me any sexy pics - I’m still sorting out some weird feelings about you here.” What? Revy had to be blunt about it. She knew he also had his own fair share of strange thoughts about this whole scenario so they might as well agree they were both kinda awkward. “I’d offer to punch him in the nuts but you always get all uppity when I threaten someone.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to change here,” Leon snorted. “Please don’t punch my ex in the balls.” He was pulling his phone out from his back pocket though. He’d only recently taken off a photo of him and James together as his lock screen, replacing it with a photo of Stella, his beautiful, beautiful car, but it didn’t take him long to find a photo of him and James together, Leon grinning and James pushing his lips to his cheek. He glanced at it for a second before flipping to a different photo, this one of James lying on the couch, book in hand, Cheeto resting on his chest. He handed the phone over to her.
All the ‘fuck this is weird’ onslaught of feelings slightly came to a halt when she saw the picture.
It’s a good thing she wasn’t drinking anything at the moment either, she would have probably spat it out. “That’s…” Revy blinked wide, zooming in on the photo to get a look at the face. “Leon, you were balls deep in Captain Hook?? Or was he - balls deep in you? Did he jerk you with his hook hand? Where is the hook hand??”
Last time she checked that fucker was married with kids somewhere but the possibility that this was another version of him came as a delayed possibility. Right now she was just trying to picture them going at it like animals and it made it even weirder.
Whatever sad lingering feelings Leon had about James on seeing his picture were suddenly blown entirely away. They’d been caught up in a tornado of what the actual fuck and tossed out to see.
“What? That’s not Captain Hook,” Leon barked. “He didn’t have a hook hand. Or a peg leg.” Did Captain Hook have a peg leg? Leon was pretty sure he did. “That was James. He’s not a pirate chasing down Peter Pan, he’s a fucking psychiatrsit.”
“I’m telling you,” Revy sighed, grabbing his phone to point at James’ face. “This face belongs to Killian Fucking Jones back where we’re from - some version of Captain Hook, definitely had a hook hand. Goddamn is this place weird. Now I have to scrub the image of you two raw-dogging each other from my brain.”
She snatched his pack of cigarettes and grabbed herself another. Revy was determined to drink and smoke the night away with the hopes of waking up and thinking back on this like it was some fucked up dream. Please let it be a dream. She might even ask Leon back home to marry her if it was.
Leon very nearly protested when she grabbed his cigarettes, but the cry died before he could even voice it. Honestly, she probably deserved it. Leon had taken his own arrival here pretty well, all things considered: he’d let himself be taken to the DOA, got the spiel, and immediately decided he wasn’t going to be here long but he could probably start looking for D in the meantime.
If he’d had something back home to be upset about leaving, well, he probably would have smoked two or three packs his first day.
He ordered another couple shots of rum, and slid one toward her. “Well, this’ll help,” he said, sliding one of them toward her. “But we really can’t get too drunk before I take you to the DOA. Seriously, those are my coworkers.”
But frankly, this was weird enough that Leon could probably do with a couple more drinks himself.
“Do I look like someone who's got a bitch for a liver to you,” Revy deadpanned, buzzed at best - it took her a good bit to get her stumbling about, her tolerance had been being built since she was a teenager. “I know all about trying not to embarrass you in front of your co-workers, dipstick.”
Turns out when a detective dates an ex-convict, people have questions. Lots of side-eyeing. All those uncomfortable, scrutinizing looks that made Revy want to shoot someone in the face.
But they needed to take the edge off so drinks it was, and they’d be walking up to the DOA walking completely straight.