Christmas was not a very traumatic time for Yelena. She didn’t celebrate many of them while being under the influence of Dreykov but that wasn’t as impactful and personal as, say, her own birthday. And the only reason she bowed out of decorating the Black Widow house was because of the ridiculously adorable enthusiasm between Kate and Emily while they did the decorating. Who was Yelena to stop that? (She was going to have to tease Kate more.)
But Yelena still wanted to decorate and so she chose the one person she could think of who, one, would expect her to sneak in through his window to start doing it anyway while he wasn’t around, and, two, probably could have used some kind of distraction.
She didn’t pick the window this time. She couldn’t with the box of decor she managed to get but after she had texted him to open his door, she was already hefting out a few sticker snowflakes and putting it on his door.
Christmas was, on the other hand, a traumatising time for Leon.
Last year, it had been fine, mostly. Stella, his car, had shown up last December. He’d had James. There’d been those days he’d spent in Serendipity Hills with James.
This year was different. This year… well, he had nothing. It seemed every time he’d started to grow close to someone, Vallo snatched them away. Revy had gone, and in her place Vallo had given him all the memories they’d shared together in that other universe where he’d been born in the 90s in Irvine, instead of in the 70s in LA.
He’d been spending a little bit of time with Henry, the one other person who remembered Orange County, but they hadn’t been close even then – Henry had been more of Revy’s friend than Leon’s, and that was still the strongest tie they had together – but he hadn’t seen Adora much outside of work, and Catra even less, given that Catra wasn’t working anymore (Leon knew he should probably talk to her about why she wasn’t on patrol anymore. He worried. But, well, he didn’t want her worrying about him).
He stared at the text from Yelena for a long minute, ran his hand down his face, and, after another moment, finished off the lowball glass of rum he had poured and set the cup down on the table.
He didn’t look that rough, if someone was going to ignore the circles under his eyes and heavy scent of tobacco and alcohol emanating from him. He was still showering and shaving every morning – his father had pressed upon him at a young age that no matter how busy or overwhelmed you were, showering and shaving every morning, making sure to brush your teeth when you woke up and before you went to bed, being sure to wear a clean shirt and clean underwear, was necessary.
If you let yourself start slipping there, then everyone would know that something was wrong, and when you were a cop, that was the last thing you wanted people to know.
It took him a moment to realize what Yelena was doing. His gaze shifted from Yelena’s face to the snowflakes already on the door, to the decorations in her arms, and then back to her face.
“The fuck are you doing, Lena?” he asked, baffled.
Yelena would have responded with the appropriate answer to that before she had seen the state he was in – and smelled. She was raised in a shitty environment, yes, but it gave her a few very great advantages such as the ability to read people pretty damn well. And even if he didn’t look like he was growing a full on Tom Hanks in Castaway beard, she could tell things were complete shit right now.
“What the fuck are you doing? Besides clearly not sleeping?” She wrinkled her nose slightly before making her way into his apartment. Barging in basically, but this was something she did quite often. At least this time, she used the front door..
Unlike Leon, Leon’s apartment was not put together, but that wasn’t much different than any other time: some – and Leon disagreed – might describe Leon as a slob. It was, in fact, one of the things that had broken him and James up in the first place. His living room was strewn with dirty clothes. There might have been more empty beer and liquor bottles thrown about, but it was hard to tell, but there were certainly more half-eaten take-out containers than usual.
Leon sighed, closing his door before he followed Yelena into his apartment. “I’m trying to relax on my day off,” he grumbled, making a half-hearted attempt to kick the laundry into a pile and to gather up some of the take-out containers. “I wasn’t expecting guests today,” he added pointedly.
“When was the last time you have ever expected my visits?” Yelena stepped around the junk scattered about. Thankfully there was a spot on the coffee table with just enough space for the box. She just needed to pick up the two beer cans that were sitting there first and that she did, and then held them up at Leon with a questioning look in her eyes.
“And besides, I’m not a guest. I’m never a guest wherever I can pop up in on my own when you’re not home. Maybe I should have waited till you were out. Did you have a party?”
“You can just toss those in the sink,” he said, choosing to misinterpret her gaze. He flushed a little at her question though. “No, no party. It’s just been a while since I tidied up is all. Please tell me those aren’t Christmas decorations.”
Yelena took the moment to frown at him before heading toward the kitchen with them. They didn’t really belong in the sink. They needed a damn recycling bin. Wherever the heck that was. Maybe she should have brought him a recycling bin instead of Christmas decorations. “A while, huh?” she called from the kitchen, before returning to the living area. “And yes, they are. Emily and Kate are decorating our house. I decided your place could use some festiveness. Well, I guessed your place could use it. I guessed correctly.”
“I haven’t decorated for Christmas since I was 17,” Leon said flatly, making his way back to where he’d been sitting on the couch before Yelena had decided to interrupt him. “Sorry, but I’m just not seized by that Christmas spirit.”
“And at seventeen, I was still murdering people while brainwashed. Didn’t have any Christmas spirit for many years.” Was that a card she constantly played to get what she wanted? It sure was. But Yelena didn’t move to start decorating that quickly. She searched around till she found something to drink – non-alcoholic, thank you – and then brought two cans of soda back into the living space, placing one in Leon’s general vicinity on the coffee table. In case he didn’t actually want any.
“I guess I seize the spirit myself as often as I can,” she said with a shrug as she opened up her soda.
Leon eyed the can of Coke. What he wanted was a beer, or maybe to pour another glass of rum. He’d been drinking too much lately, he knew, but it was hard not to, with everything going to shit and the holiday season suddenly upon them. It was hard, real hard, not to compare it to how things had been last year at this time.
“And when I was seventeen, I still had a family, and there isn’t much point of seizing the spirit without one,” he snapped, and then grimaced. He pinched the bridge of his nose. He knew there was some fucked up shit with Yelena’s family too, even if he didn’t necessarily know all the details, and that hadn’t been fair.
He reached for the can of Coke. “I’m sorry,” he said, shifting on the couch to make room for Yelena to take a seat if she wanted to. He cracked open the can. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. This time of year just puts me on edge, and this year’s been especially shitty.”
Yelena didn’t even blink an eye, simply put the can up to her lips for a sip before coming around to Leon’s side. Instead of sitting on the sofa next to him, though, she perched herself at the edge of the coffee table. “Revy?”
Leon cracked open his coke and took a long drink, and then reached for his cigarettes. Then he put them down again. He hadn’t smoked inside his apartment now – he usually went out to the patio – and he wasn’t going to start now. No matter how tempting.
“It’s not just Revy,” he said after a minute. “I mean, a little, I guess. I know she’s happier about being back home. She wouldn’t shut up about it the whole time she was here. And now I’ve got these memories of this other Leon, and I know how much they fucking cared for each other so I should be happy for her.” He frowned. “I am happy for her,” he added, though it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself. “And I’m happy Cullen got sent back home to his Dorian.” He wasn’t glad that Colt had been sent back to that Loop, or the handful of other people he’d started to become friends with had been sent back to wherever they came from, or that James had dumped him. But there was nothing he could do about any of that, and there was no point in getting hung up on it.
“It’s just… shit, I don’t know. I just feel like I’m always losing people. Not just here. Back home too. I could never just… hold on to someone. In the end, they all either left or were taken from me. And this time of year, it just always brings that shit up. Of everyone I’ve ever cared about who just isn’t there anymore.”
Had he mentioned Colt, Yelena would have felt a strong pull at her heart for that situation. She hated that he had gone back too. She still did feel a pull at her heart, for Leon, for people he lost in general, people who came and went. Selfishly, she was glad it didn’t apply to Kate or Natasha. Not yet, at least. You could never tell with Vallo…
She pushed that thought aside because it was a dangerous rabbit hole to fall into. “You still have some family here. And maybe the rest of them will come back.”
“There’s no bringing back the dead,” Leon said flatly. And maybe that wasn’t strictly true in Vallo – people seemed to arrive pretty frequently from before their deaths, or after their deaths or… whatever. But he wasn’t going to hold on to the idea that some trick of fate was going to bring back the people he’d lost back home. “I don’t want to put up Christmas decorations, Yelena. I don’t want to think of all the times I used to do it with my folks, or about how the last time I had the chance to, I told my mom I’d rather do… whatever else I decided to do that year.” He’d forgotten whatever it was it had been; it hadn’t been important, it had never been important, and the fact that he’d missed out on decorating with his mom because he was pissed off for no good reason got under his skin whenever he thought about it.
Yelena gave a slight shrug because well, Natasha being here was prime example of that being totally wrong. “Man, pretty sure my worst memory of Christmas after becoming myself was trying to hunt down and kill Natasha’s best friend who I thought had killed her.”
Heaving a sigh, she pushed herself off the coffee table to pivot around and slump into the sofa next to him. “So what do you want to do instead? Because it’s kind of unhealthy for you to sit and smoke and drink in here all day. And plus…” she gave a slight pause for the dramatic effect of saying something really heavy. “I want to spend time with you. It’s not the same and I don’t know if you feel the same way but you’re still my family.”
She liked to act like saying touchy-feely-sentimental stuff was hard but reality was that all of it came super easy for her to say. Yelena just preferred to give a tough love persona. And to emphasize that, she went ahead and gave his shoulder a shove with hers.
Leon’s forehead creased, and someone could be forgiven for thinking he was glaring. He wasn’t though, just thinking. Leon’s family, his mom and his dad, the family he’d had for the first seventeen, eighteen years of his life, hadn’t been his last family. He’d built a family with D and with Chris and all the animals at the pet shop, before Chris had gone back home to the East Coast, and D had decided to spend a decade running all across the globe from him. In that other world he remembered, he’d had Revy. And here, too, there’d been Catra and Adora, who were as close to sisters as Leon had ever figured he’d come.
Yelena was a pain in his ass, but yeah, he realized: at some point, she’d managed to worm her way into his heart and made herself family, too.
He scowled.
“I hope you didn’t bring a fucking Christmas tree,” Leon grumbled. “God knows where the fuck I’m going to put that.”
Yelena gave him a wicked smile. “Only a small one. I figured I wasn’t going to go too wild at your place.” She let the smile falter into a hesitant one though because he had just shared something big with her, or at least it felt like it was big. She and Leon snipped at each other more or less for about eighty percent of their conversations. Serious talks were very occasional.
“We don’t have to do anything yet. We can go and get something to snack on and drink. Non-alcoholic, though. Geez, it’s like you’re trying to compete against me and Natasha.”
Leon snorted. “If you’re challenging me to a drinking competition, Lena, you’re on,” he said. He ran a hand down his face. “But yeah, sure. You wanna go out someplace? I don’t think I have much in the way of snacks here.”
“I’m challenging you to a How Long Can You Not Have Beer competition.” Yelena wrinkled her nose before she stood up and held out a hand for him. “It’s a depressive drink. But yeah, let’s go and get something to eat and then we’ll discuss miniscule amount of decoration up in here later.”
“Sounds like a dumb competition,” Leon grumbled. He took her hand though, and pulled himself up to his feet. “But deal. You’re not turning my apartment into a winter wonderland, by the way,” he added, and then grudgingly added, “but you can put up a couple things when we get back.”