WHAT: Revy shares a little about her past with her Leon WHERE: Morningside Rooftop WHEN: Backdated to late October, before Revy disappeared WARNINGS: There's always warnings with these two. Language, references to murder and covering it up, shitty parents STATUS: Complete
That’s what she claimed anyway, the giant invasion of hangover pain clouding her brain. That hadn’t happened in awhile, but truth be told she hadn’t really put down the bottle much since her arrival here. Part of her thought that if she just drank her way through the experience it would land her ass back home that much faster; in her own shitty apartment, her own bed, her own stupid rat (who was getting old), her own Leon.
The days kept going on, and on, and on. She was still here. A job hadn’t been found because she was being stubborn about it. Employment hinted at permanance and fuck that noise. Revy got by gambling instead a few times, and it had kept her afloat well enough considering she didn’t have to pay jack shit for the standard Vallo housing.
So she hit the shots a little hard the night before, came to regret it in the morning and after a few hours of being queasy she had gotten food. For her and Leon, a set of greasy burgers and fries because her normal included always taking Leon into consideration when it came to these things. It was a habit impossible to kick when there was a Leon literally right there.
Revy wanted to punch his face. She just couldn’t decide if she wanted to do that with her fists or with her mouth. (But, then again, that was normal when it came to this fucker.)
They were lounging on Morningside’s rooftop, the space decked out for gatherings but they were by themselves, polishing off the food with a side of cigarettes. Revy glared at her container of fries, thinking.
“If people who are dead pop up here and ride Vallo out like some afterlife,” she started, “what happens if you die in Vallo? Think you just get flung back home?”
Fucked up question. But Revy was always pretty fucked up anyway.
Leon knew he’d been drinking more since Revy showed up, knew he’d been drinking a lot even before she’d shown up. He should probably cool it, if only to prove to Catra and Adora that yeah, of course he could go a day without drinking, but the hangovers made that tough and Revy made that tougher.
She hadn’t suggested beer for breakfast this morning though, so there was that.
He’d just taken a bite of his burger when she’d asked dying though, and he choked, pounding himself a couple times in the chest to loosen the hunk of meat caught in his esophagus, and didn’t bother to try to swallow it again before he answered her.
“No, I don’t,” he said sharply, and then took a moment to chew his food properly and swallow it down again. “I mean, no one really knows how any of this shit works. But I think if someone were to bite the bullet here, that’d be it. Some other version of them would carry on with their life, but shit would be over for them.” He frowned, staring at her suspiciously. “You’re not thinking of hurling yourself off the roof, are you?”
“Dumb way to die,” Revy snorted in response. If it was a guaranteed way to get the hell out of here, sure, why not. But he was right and she hated it; no one really knew how this shit worked and if she had a say in it she’d prefer to go out guns blazing. Literally. She plucked a fry out to bite into. “It was just a thought. Stupid fuck existential Vallo crisis.”
Having Henry around made this place easier to stomach. It was the Henry she knew, the one she had history with. Revy could argue that she could adapt anywhere without even needing people but it was pointless, because she had gotten soft and did, in fact, fucking need people like the pussy she was.
It made her irrationally hate her french fries.
“Ugh, take these,” she groused and shoved them into Leon’s lap. “They’re too damn salty.”
“You’re damn right it’s a dumb way to die,” Leon said, and then frowned thoughtfully. “Though, no matter how you die, the end result’s the same, and equally as dumb.”
He might not have known Revy well, and maybe under normal circumstances he wouldn’t have gotten to know her as well as he had. Maybe in normal circumstances, he would’ve had one conversation with her and never would have thought twice about her. But whether he wanted to or not, he liked her now. She was like some sort of obnoxious mold that had managed to grow on him. D would probably have some sort of flora or fauna example to make, like those fish that clung to other fish and cleaned their teeth or something.
The fact of the matter was, Leon didn’t want Revy to get too reckless trying to get back home.
“You really miss this other me, huh?” he asked, around a mouthful of Revy’s fries.
Revy flashed him a killer glare. Bold fucking question, man. But he also wasn’t wrong, and it had to be so goddamn obvious at this point anyway, and she didn’t really have the drive in her right now to talk shit or shove her middle finger in his face. Yeah, she missed other Leon. Yeah, the fact that she might not see other Leon for the next several months - or even years - was an itch that was becoming an emotional clusterfuck of hives.
“We were in a good place,” she grumbled, leaning back into the lounge chair. Her arm went over her eyes - the headache was still kinda here. “We were happy?”
That shouldn’t have been a question. They were happy. They were cohabiting, and had a routine going, and it was sometimes a little boring but coming home to Leon was something she had grown fond of. She didn’t realize how fond of it she was until she didn’t have it anymore.
“We went to Hawaii once, you know. Drank booze out of pineapples like cliches. It was after I had to save your ass from being kidnapped by this crazy lady, she locked you up in her basement and everything.”
“Hope I came home and actually remembered the vacation,” Leon grumbled. He’d gone away with D once before – not his choice, Chris had made Leon bring him along on his paid vacation – but he’d come home without a single memory of the thing, and no freaking idea why the citizens of the island he’d gone to visit put out an ad in the LA Times thanking him for saving all their asses.
“Especially if it was because I had women locking me in the basement. What the fuck happened there?”
“Angry wife problems,” Revy said after a moment of recalling the clusterfuck of that situation. “Guess you - arrested her husband and he died in prison?” Yeah, that. She was confident that it was that situation, although she’d been more focused on tracking Leon down versus the actual reason of his kidnapping. She hadn’t cared about the why. She cared that some dumbass kidnapped her stupid goddamn boyfriend.
Her arm dropped from her eyes to look at him. “I shot the bitch in the face just for you.”
Angry wife problems. Leon knew that well enough, except when the girlfriend of a man he’d killed had come after him, she’d gone after Count D and Chris, intending to use them as hostages. She’d wanted to kill them in front of Leon so he’d know how it felt, he’d told her that she could kill him if she wanted, but she had to let them go. D had done one of his freaky-deaky D things, and in the end, no one had been killed at all. No one except her boyfriend, at least. He shoved a fry in his mouth, got ready to say he knew how that went.
And then Revy finished her story and Leon jolted like he’d been electrocuted, inhaling sharply and choking on the fry. He spent a couple moments pounding on his chest to dislodge it.
“You’re joking, right?” he asked, even though he was pretty fucking sure she wasn’t. The look in her eyes didn’t scream ‘haha, got you.’ “Did I… Did he… arrest you?”
He knew the answer to that, too. Could feel it in his gut.
“Nah,” Revy breezily replied. “Lady had it in for us - she wanted you dead, and she tried to kill me to make sure of it.” She had given her a chance. Kind of. But she knew these situations, knew how it always ended, and the woman had been thirsty for payback. “Could have probably knocked her unconscious instead of blowing her face off.”
In retrospect. Her instinct was always erred on the side of excessive violence, though.
“My old man shot you in the chest, you know,” she said with a grunt, pushing herself to sit upright again despite the throb in her temple. “You woulda died if it weren’t for that fucking plant. Told myself I wasn’t going to let your stupid ass get even close to death again. I don’t care what it takes.”
It was love. A little twisted, probably, but sometimes people had to die to keep the ones you liked (and loved) safe. Revy reached for the cigarettes to light one up. “Don’t worry. You don’t cover up for me - much. I don’t shoot people that often anymore.”
Christ, that was a lot to digest, and Leon needed time to process … pretty much all of that. “So I take it your old man doesn’t approve,” he said, without thinking. And then, “That plant?” His brow furrowed. “You mean Gattolotto?”
He’d been shot in the chest – and the gut – before, and according to the doctors it had been a miracle he’d survived at all. When he’d been shot, he’d dreamed he’d seem Gattolotto blooming. Some part of him had always wondered if there’d been something strange about her.
“So did I quit the force?” he asked after a moment. Revy had spoken of this other Leon like he was still a detective, but when Leon realized he couldn’t do the job anymore, he’d turned in his badge and had packed up and left. The idea that this other Leon hung onto his job made him uneasy.
I take it your old man doesn’t approve. Revy snorted. “Didn’t approve, didn’t care, wasn’t anything personal,” she clarified. “But that’s the plant. Gattolotto. You shoulda been dead, then you weren’t.” Then they just - made out in some criminal bunk underneath a stripclub and decided to take a trip to an island. They weren’t that complicated but at the same time, they were. There was a lot about Revy and her past that went against what Leon stood for. There was a lot about Leon that made her want not want to trust him, and the cop thing was definitely one, considering –
Well. No need to get into the depressive backstory of what they’d done to her as a ‘gutter rat.’
After taking a drag, she let out a slow exhale of smoke. “You didn’t quit, though. We moved - you were joining a precinct on the east coast. Dunno, guess you began to realize that shit ain’t always falling in black and white categories. Lots of shades of gray exist in between when it comes to morals. There are a lot of dirty cops and detectives but that’s not you. You’re not one of them.”
“I’m sorry that your dad seems like a fucking asshole,” Leon said. He’d have been an asshole for shooting Leon no matter what his motivation was, but the fact that he shot his daughter’s … whatever they were and it wasn’t anything personal was somehow especially shitty.
He leaned back in his chair, reached for his own smokes, and lit one. He took a drag, then another. His own morals had slipped a little, but he couldn’t picture any world where he actively covered up for his girlfriend’s murders – even if they were in defense of him or herself – and wasn’t considered dirty.
“I quit,” Leon said after contemplative moment. “A long time ago. And it wasn’t just to follow D.” He frowned, tilting his head. “I think I followed D because I didn’t really have anything left in LA, you know? It wasn’t like I had a lot of friends. There was my partner, Jill, and I was friendly with some of the other guys on the force, but they weren’t really friend. And Chris had left without saying goodbye. When he…” He broke off. When Chris had called LA again, a week after he’d taken off, he hadn’t been looking to talk to Leon at all. He’d wanted D, and the only reason that he’d gotten Leon was because D had left without saying good-bye either, and Leon had been left alone in his shop, hoping he’d come back, in the days before D’s father had taken him and tried to kill him.
“Chris wasn’t going to miss me. And maybe I’d have stayed for my job. It’s what I had before D came into my life. But at some point…” he shrugged one shoulder. “At some point I realized that I’d stopped thinking what D was doing was so bad. That maybe some people deserved what they got, and maybe if D got what he wanted, if somehow D managed to get revenge on the entire human race after all, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. You can’t keep enforcing the law if you don’t think that it should be applied to everyone, even if you are in love with them.”
Leon, quitting. Huh. Revy couldn’t picture it. He was an ass about a lot shit but he tried, and maybe that’s what endeared her to him despite every brain cell not damaged by excessive drinking screamed.
“Look,” she sighed, smoking exhaling from her nose. “The law can’t account for everything in my world, or yours. Because weird shit, right? It’s magic, it’s fucking chaos, it’s shit the majority of the public ain’t ready to understand because it’ll send everything tits up with people trying to figure out how to explain it. And the law doesn’t apply to people with money, you know that. I think you stick with it back home because there is good you can do with the power you’ve got, even if it means you gotta bend the rules you’re sworn to uphold.”
Even if they were for selfish reasons too, like protecting your own. He had protected her, and Henry, and Revy had been trying to make sure he didn’t need to cover for her in a way that would jeopardize everything. She wasn’t helping Chang with side jobs. Her guns were usually in a safe. Leon had met her halfway and she was doing her best to do the same.
Because if she did meet him in the middle somewhere, then she could stop him from going down the same path Rock had gone.
Leon’s lip twitched, in understanding if not amusement. Because no, the law couldn’t account for everything; if it could, D would have been arrested back when Leon first started investigating it. As it was, people looked at his police reports, typo-filled as they were, and assumed that Leon was doing the same drugs he accused D of selling.
“I miss it sometimes,” Leon admitted. He missed the feeling like he was actually doing good, that he was good at his job. No matter how many patrols he did, he really was one of the weakest members of the Defense teams – he didn’t have any special powers, assuming you didn’t count being able to understand when birds called you an idiot, he didn’t have any special training, didn’t have magic. Sometimes he felt like he did good. Other times, he wondered what he was even doing, creeping up on forty and running around in the woods with a gun like that would do any good against the monsters they so often faced.
“I’m glad that your Leon managed to find some sort of balance,” he said after a moment. Maybe his becoming disillusioned with the entire system was something that was inevitable in all worlds. There was enough of a pattern that he could admit to himself that he had a bad habit of falling for people who fell on the wrong side of the law: even James had belonged to Vorerra once, before Leon had ever met him. “I guess he’s lucky to have found you after all, if you helped him find it.”
Revy had gotten over her caution about being vulnerable with Leon a long time ago. She wasn’t always perfect about it; she had always been bloody knuckles, broken bones, finger on the trigger when it came to solving all her problems and dealing with her stupid shit. Sometimes she shut down, got cold, got vicious with a dead look in her eyes.
Sometimes she thought it would be easier to do all that with this Leon. Having him close while not having him at all sucked some giant elephant balls.
“Move,” she grumbled, putting out her cigarettes and switching seats. Revy shoved Leon with the impressive force of her hips and ass so he could make room and squeeze in next to him. Don’t fucking ask her if this was her way of cuddling. It wasn’t. (Maybe.)
Leon grumbled, but he shoved over, giving Revy room to sit next to him, thigh to thigh. He wondered if he should put his arm around her shoulders, and settled instead for slinging it across the back of the chair to get it out of the way. Revy was just about the most annoying woman – the most annoying person – he’d ever met, but he thought, maybe, that he could get used to this.