WHAT: Leon gets a memory dump from another universe, and goes to talk to Henry WHERE: Henry's apartment WHEN: Early November WARNINGS:Day Morning drinking STATUS: Complete
He’d heard of the memory dumps, had seen them mentioned on the network time enough, though in the year that he’d been in Vallo, he’d never had one himself. He’d always assumed if he ever got one, it would be because he’d finally found D, had finally cornered him where he couldn’t keep running, had finally managed to have a conversation with him and give him Chris’ drawing. He thought if he ever had a memory dump, it would be his own memories of his own world.
He hadn’t expected it to be memories of a whole different life. A life he’d been told about. He remembered that first date with Revy – what he still considered a date, at least, even if Revy hadn’t – where he and Revy had ended the night pointing their sidearms at each other. He remembered bleeding out on Revy’s couch, remembered getting shot, remembered Revy shooting other people to protect him, and covering up the crime scenes. He remembered lazy afternoons in bed, shoving pizza in their mouths, and Hawaii, and their shitty apartment in New York that was all theirs.
And it all came too late, because Leon hadn’t seen or heard from Revy in a week – neither had anyone else – and even though it didn’t feel right, it was probably time to admit that she’d been spent back home. Sent back home to this other Leon whose life he remembered – this other Leon who’d remembered his life too.
He remembered Henry too. He and Henry hadn’t been close: Henry had always been more of Revy’s friend than Leon’s. But he remembered hanging out with Henry sometimes. Remembered busting his nose with a basketball the first time they met. Remembered shooting some sort of horrific ghost or something in Henry’s vegetable crisper.
He knocked on Henry’s door, a twelve-pack of beer in hand. It was still early, not quite noon, but Henry was the only one who’d known Revy like Leon – this other Leon – had. The only one who might make sense of this life in Orange County, California, that Leon had just had shoved into his brain.
It hadn’t taken Henry very long to come to the conclusion that Revy had gone back home. And, to be honest, he thought that was for the best. It was clear (at least to him) that Revy wasn’t happy here. She could hardly be blamed for that, though. How could anyone be happy to be plucked out of their life and be dropped into a strange new (and confusing) place?
He would be lying, however, if he said it didn’t hurt. Revy was his friend. She’d been a positive impact on his life, believe it or not. He felt the hole not having her around had left.
In a way, he wasn’t too surprised to find Leon on the other side of his door. Though the man hadn’t said so in so many words, Henry had gotten the idea he felt the hole too. He opened the door and greeted the other man with a rueful “Hey.” Followed by “Come in.”
Leon almost took a step forward, and then hesitated at the threshold, frowning. “Your shit isn’t haunted, is it?” he asked. He remembered Henry being something of a ghost magnet.
Henry’s brows furrowed, “No,” he answered carefully. “Nothing’s followed me home.” Though, ghosts rarely did follow Henry all the way home. The hauntings he’d experienced in Orange County (and subsequent apartments after he’d moved) had been caused by something different. So far, though, this apartment had been something of a safe haven.
Henry’s brows furrowed deeper behind his shaggy hair. He knew he’d told Leon about the Hole -- or, rather, Revy had -- but he couldn’t remember if he’d mentioned the hauntings. The rum had been flowing pretty freely that night.
"Good," Leon said, stepping passed the threshold. "I'm not keen on unloading my gun I to your vegetable crisper again." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Or… whatever. I don't know how this fucking shit works. I woke up this morning with a killer headache and memories of a whole other life crammed into my head."
If Henry’s brows furrowed any harder, he’d end up with a headache. He wasn’t sure he understood what Leon was talking about. “Wait,” he held up his hand. “What memories?” Though Henry already had an idea. “You mean you have Orange County Leon’s memories? How did that happen?”
“Yeah, like that,” Leon said. “Twenty-six years of memories all crammed into my head at once.” Some of them were familiar – different flavours of the same events that he’d already lived, memories he’d never wanted to revisit. A lot of them were new, things that had never happened to him before.
“I don’t know how the fuck it happened,” Leon grumbled, dropping down onto Henry’s couch. “It just did. Sometimes people will get memory dumps. I don’t know how often it happens that they’ll remember an entirely different life, but sometimes… you know, they’ll come from one point in time and then remember things that happened at a later point in time, like there’s some version of them still back home living their life, and they’re still connected to them.”
Henry had an inkling of what Leon was talking about. Though his experience of remembering another life hadn’t come all at once. It had come piecemeal through dreams. Leon had called it a “Memory Dump”, and looking at him slouched on his couch, Henry thought that was an appropriate thing to call it.
He relieved Leon of the beer and handed him one. “You look like you need this,” he said, then took the remaining bottles to the kitchen so they could stay cool in his fridge. He wondered if this meant that Leon had all the Dreams that Orange County Leon had as well. Whew, three sets of memories crammed into a single head. Henry thought it was lucky Leon was still sane.
Then it occurred to Henry that this meant that Leon remembered Revy too. Remembered what she meant to him -- or at least what she meant to the other version of him. Jesus, that wouldn’t be confusing for Leon or anything…
Abandoning the beer in the fridge, Henry got down a bottle of rum as well as two glasses. He brought them back out to Leon, setting the bottle down on the coffee table. “You might want this instead,” he said before he had a seat himself. After a moment of somewhat awkward silence he asked “you wanna talk about it?”
Leon did need the beer, and had guzzled down half the can by the time that Henry came back to the rum. It didn’t take him long to decide to make the switch, and he poured himself a generous helping to the rum.
“I don’t even know what to say,” he admitted, pinching between the eyes. “It’s just… I don’t know how I’m supposed to deal with two different lives living side-by-side in my brain.” He took a gulp of the rum and exhaled. “But I guess this other Leon managed to, so I’ll have to too.” He closed his eyes, and leaned his head back so it rested on the back of the couch. When he opened his eyes again, he was staring at Henry’s ceiling. “It seems especially shitty of Vallo to give me all these memories after Revy’s already taken off. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with any of it.”
He felt lost.
Henry didn’t answer right away. When he did his words came slowly, as though he was testing each one as he said it. “I could tell you some of the things the other people back in Orange County used to say about the Dreams and the Memories. The things they used to say to explain it, or give a reason behind everything. But honestly, no one actually knew what was going on or why. They just existed and people could interpret or do with them whatever they wanted to do. Some people took them as warnings. Others got closer to people who Dreamed of similar things or places, for better or for worse. And others well, they just kind of hung on for the ride. That’s what I mostly did.”
Leon nodded. He remembered denying it for as long as he could, the same way that he’d denied that D was anything other than a deranged shopkeeper, until the evidence was piled high enough that he couldn’t deny it anymore.
But he could understand the impulse to stick close to people who dreamed the same thing: they might not have actually had the same experiences, but they could remember them. He hadn’t been an especially close friend of Henry’s back in Orange County, but… well, he’d still been the first person Leon had come to with this.
“You said you left Orange County too, didn’t you? After me and Revy took off?”
Henry stopped rolling the glass between his hands. “Yeah,” he answered. “I wasn’t going to. Not at first. Back then I thought that I was stuck there. Y’know…because of the hole? Everyone else I knew and cared about had left, but I was afraid of what would happen if I left and left the hole there.” Henry gripped the glass in his hand tightly. “Then my Dreams got weird. I mean, they were always weird, but they got weirder. I had the same Dream four times with four different results. One of them I died…was murdered…” He let go of the glass with one hand to absently rub at his chest. “And that pretty much did it. I couldn’t hang on anymore after that.”
“Oh shit.” Leon balked. Leon remembered that he’d had the same dream multiple times too, except that his had never changed. They’d been scenes from his own life, and if there were any other Leon’s out there living similar experiences, then Leon didn’t know them. But to have four different results to one…
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that had happened.”
Henry looked up from the glass with a one shoulder shrug and a rueful smile. “It’s alright,” he said. “You both had already left by that point. I thought about calling, but honestly, I didn’t want to think about it, or the Dreams anymore.” He let out a breath and set the glass down on the table. “I just wanted to get out.” He reached for the bottle of rum. He offered to fill Leon’s glass again first.
Leon held out his glass for the refill and took a gulp. He suspected that Catra and Adora would disapprove of hard liquor this early in the morning; it was something he should probably think about… later.
“Where’d you end up after you left? Did you go with uh…” he crinkled his brows together, but in the end, the name escaped him, “that girl that you were seeing?”
“No,” Henry shook his head. “We split up.” He poured rum into his glass and took a generous glug before sitting back in his seat. “There was dream bleedover from my last set of dreams and neither of us handled it really well. Mostly me.” He let out a breath. “Besides, she had her career there in Orange County, plus her friends.” He shrugged.
“After California I went where there was work.” Henry went on after another generous glug of rum. “I spent a couple of months in Colorado taking pictures for a tourism board. After that I headed east. I was in Savannah, GA, when I fell through whatever wormhole and ended up here.”
It had been a while since Henry had done any day drinking -- at least since Revy and Leon had left California -- and he was starting to feel the effects. His brows furrowed under his shaggy brown hair. A curious question about Leon’s memories had popped into his mind and he wasn’t sure how to ask.
He gave Henry’s glass a tap with his own in commiseration.
“Shit, I’m sorry to hear that.” But it was understandable. The dreams were rough, and some things… well, it was pretty easy for a relationship to fall apart, given the right circumstances. Dream bleedover seemed like a better reason than “couldn’t find a fucking house together.”
“Vallo beats Georgia at least.” He took a sip, glanced at Henry, and waited a beat. When nothing was forthcoming, he prompted, “Alright, out with it.”
Henry’s expression turned sheepish. “Well,” he said, once again speaking slowly as though testing his words. “I was just wondering,” he started. “The Dreams that OC Leon got -- were those…” his brows scrunched together again. He hoped this didn’t sound as stupid coming out of his mouth as it did in his head -- but he was curious. “...where those your memories. Like…was he Dreaming about you? I mean, since you’re from a different life and he was Dreaming of a different life.” Not that Henry knew much about what OC Leon had dreamt about. Just a few things here and there. He remembered Leon mentioning rabbits, though -- man eating rabbits. Henry’s eyes got wide and he leaned forward. “Did you get attacked by blood thirsty bunnies?”
“Yeah, the Dreams he got were my life,” Leon confirmed. There was an audible capitalization of the word Dream, a skill that it seemed all the Dreamers in Orange County had managed to perfect and that had transferred over along with the memories. “I didn’t get attached by blood thirst bunnies personally, but I was a responding officer and witnessed them talking whatever poor LA citizens got in their way though. The things had multiplied into the millions in the span of an afternoon; we were almost sure they were going to overrun LA, maybe even the entirety of the continent, before they’d all dropped dead en masse.” He paused, frowning. “We did get man-eating rabbits not long after I arrived here though, so that fucking sucked.”
“There were man eating rabbits here?” Henry asked. He sat back in his seat again putting together everything, his eyes still wide. “Shit.” Then another thought hit him. “Where they the same ones from your world?” He asked, though he was afraid he already knew the answer. If flesh eating bunnies were an actual thing in Vallo, he probably would have already been warned about them.
Leon nodded. “I think so,” he said, slowly. “I can’t be sure entirely, but it happened when there seemed to be a lot of creatures coming from a few different worlds.” He frowned. “That happens sometimes. It’s the main point of the Defense Teams, really. The space between this world and a whole shitton of other ones is pretty thin, and it’s not always people that come through.”
Henry should have figured something like that would happen in this place. After all, he'd stepped through some kind of portal to get here. Why wouldn’t other things find their way here too? Henry wasn’t particularly thrilled about it either. “Crap,” he muttered before emptying his glass. He picked up the rum bottle again. “What happened to the rabbits?”
Leon shrugged. “Everything disappeared all at once; I’m guessing they went back to wherever they came from. Hopefully not LA.” It was probably LA. He took a sip of his rum. “But usually it’s not like that. That was a clusterfuck, really. Usually if shit comes through people’s worlds, it happens one at a time.”
Henry thought they probably went back to LA too, but he didn’t dare say so. He refilled his glass again and decided he was not going to think about things from his world showing up in Vallo. Nah, that was an Orange County thing and he wasn’t getting any weird Dreams here…
Henry set the bottle down and gave Leon a frown. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You came here for help with your new set of memories and I haven’t exactly been helpful.”
Leon waved a hand dismissively,. “I just needed to get it all off my chest,” he said. “I don’t know how anyone can be helpful with shit like this but…” he shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s just nice to have someone around who just fucking gets it.”
He massaged the bridge of his nose. He could have screamed at how unfair it was that he didn’t remember Revy until she was gone, but he’d already bitched about it to Henry; he wasn’t about to beat a dead horse. Instead, he sighed, and knocked back the rest of the liquor in his cup. “Thanks for listening,” he said after a minute. “I should get out of your hair.”
Henry and Leon may not have been close buddies in Orange County, but Henry had always liked him. He liked this version of Leon too. “Don’t worry about it. My doors always open if you need to talk or whatever,” he said, motioning with his glass towards the door. “It’s a lot to take in. If you wanna hang out and just shoot the shit that’s fine.” He shrugged. “It’s not like I’m in a rush to get anywhere.”
Leon thought about it for a moment, and then settled into the couch. It wasn’t like he had anywhere to go either, other than somewhere to sit alone, and this, frankly, beat that. He’d been spending too much time isolating lately.
“Alright,” he said. “I can probably stay for a couple more.”