WHAT: An attempt at some communication to try and clear things up WHERE: Vallo Forest WHEN: Today, during Defense Patrol WARNINGS: So much language someone give them soap to eat STATUS: Complete
Things were awkward. Things had been awkward. They’d been awkward ever since Revy had come back, and Leon didn’t know where all this tension was coming from.
Well, okay, that wasn’t necessarily true. He’d spent far too much time in bed, head pillowed on his hands as he stared up at the ceiling, not to have some idea. It had to be weird to have some version of your boyfriend – some weird, older version of your boyfriend – hanging around when he wasn’t actually your boyfriend. It had to be even weirder when he had all the memories to go with it.
Because he wasn’t Revy’s Leon. He had over ten years on Revy’s Leon, for one. Life had taken them in different directions, and even if there were weirdly similar parts – events that happened almost beat-for-beat the same in both worlds – their lives had taken different paths.
It was eating at him though. He didn’t expect Revy to want to jump his bones or anything (would he have said no if she tried? He didn’t think he would; he tried not to think about it too much though), but it would have been nice if she’d look at him in a way that didn’t convey how much she wanted to squish him under her boot like a cockroach.
Maybe he should just cut his losses and avoid her. He thought, sometimes, that that would be the best bet. Except he didn’t want to. Even if she clearly wanted nothing to do with him, he couldn’t bring himself to just cut that string.
Besides, they worked together. They were both of them on Team C, and they got paired off more often than not. Like now.
He was trailing a few feet behind her, trying not to watch her ass as she clomped ahead of him, and was also trying not to go nuts. Leon wasn’t chatty guy. He could spend an entire day not talking to anyone, and had taken to enjoy the work he was doing at the Sanctuary just for that: working alongside Kratos often meant that he didn’t have to say anything for long stretches of time. But it was different with Revy, and after the tense silence had stretched on for over an hour, he’d decided he’d had just about enough of it.
“What the fuck is your problem anyway, Revy?” he asked. He… probably could have phrased that better. He didn’t especially care to try again though.
It wasn’t like she didn’t want to be around him.
Okay, fuck, wait. Not entirely true, but–not entirely wrong, either. Revy wanted to be around him. Then she didn’t. They were two extremes, hot and cold; sometimes she could figure out the warm setting.
Sometimes.
It wasn’t very often.
The only thing she could do is accept this for what it was: she was stuck here, she had income, a roof, one real close friend from home (Henry), and a person who was another version of her fucking boyfriend that suddenly had his memories but also didn’t want to talk about it so fuck him. He wanted to keep it vague–fine. He was probably ashamed, anyway.
(“You’re dating a cop,” Chang had said, amused in all the wrong ways about it, when she moved back to New York with Leon in tow. “You, of all people.”
And given her history–
“Yeah.” Revy sighed. “I know.”)
He still wasn’t her Leon, and those memories didn’t make him her Leon, just like her Leon having memories of this Leon didn’t make him this Leon and holy shit, the hell was this, some weird inception moment? It made her brain hurt. Revy tried not to think about it (even if it was sometimes all she could think about), and tried to just do the honest living work thing (that sometimes paired them together, like now–should she ask to switch teams?), and she would bide her time until she was sent back.
Whenever that would be.
Today had even been going fine, actually. She had the pistols he’d given her for Christmas (god, why) arming her for any threats. They weren’t talking. Revy thought back on some porn she saw that was weird but also kind of hot.
Then Leon opened his mouth, and she realized they weren’t walking side by side.
“I didn’t say anything,” Revy frowned, stopping dead in her tracks to turn around and look at him. “The fuck crawled up your ass and died?”
“I know you didn’t,” Leon said. “And that’s the problem! You’re the one who’s got something up their ass!”
No, this was a bad start. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Nope, sorry. I didn’t mean to start like that. I just… shit’s been weird with us ever since you got back, and I don’t want it to be. I know I’m not, you know, him, but I’m not some cockroach on the sole of your boot either.”
Revy watched him, and narrowed her eyes.
“Shit’s been fine,” she blatantly lied, pressing her lips into a flat line for a moment there, and then, “you don’t want to talk about it and it is what it is, I ain’t forcing you into anything.” Vaguely, she had the memory of him saying I remember but she hadn’t known what that meant, and it made sense when she talked to Henry but–fuck, that was it.
That was all he said. Like those memories were some kind of fucking after though, like it wasn’t worth saying anything beyond that or clarifying.
“Keep walking,” she grumbled, turning around to move ahead.
Leon growled, but he fell into step beside her. “What the fuck do you think this is, a game of croquet? If I didn’t want to talk about it, I wouldn’t be trying to talk about it.”
“Are we talking about it,” Revy grit her teeth, “or are we talking about you being a cockroach on the sole of my fucking shoe, boot, whatever.”
Yeah, this was a damn sign that she needed to transfer teams. The fuck was she thinking, sticking around after knowing that they were on the same one? She couldn’t co-exist with him peacefully. “I’m just trying to treat you like you aren’t anything so it isn’t fucking weird, okay?”
“I don’t know what it you’re talking about!” Leon snapped. Was there an it they had to talk about? Was the it why Revy was being so weird? Did he say something dumb when drunk? She had to be used to that by now. Was it the fact that now he remembered falling in love with her? Because she’d seemed pretty fucking blasé about that when he’d first mentioned it to her, and he hadn’t gotten the impression that that was something she’d wanted to talk about at all.
He tried not to be too hurt when she said that he wasn’t anything, though. He’d thought they’d been friends, at least. Antagonistic friends, sure, but still friends, at least. Problem was, trying didn’t do anything; he was pretty fucking hurt.
He pulled a smoke from his pack and lit it without offering her one. “Whatever, let’s just drop it,” he muttered.
There was a moment of silence while she let that simmer. Until it reached boiling point.
Boiling point involved a hand shooting out, fingers curling into the collar of his shirt so she could give him a violent yank in her direction–but that put their faces too close, Revy couldn’t fucking deal with that, so she shoved him back. “About you! Remembering! Henry had to tell me, Leon! Fucking Henry!”
Revy was rage now, lips pulled back and teeth bared and eyes tightened into a glare.
For a moment, Leon wondered if Revy was going to kiss him, but before he could really finish forming the thought, she shoved him away; he stumbled back a couple of steps before he caught his balance again. He took a moment to sort through everything she’d just said.
“I told you!” he yelled, when he finally made sense of it. “The fuck are you talking about? I told you the day you came back! You’re the one who obviously didn’t want to talk about it!”
Leon had absolutely wanted to talk about it. The whole thing had been a confusing, headache inducing mess, and he hadn’t known what to do with any of the feelings the new memories had brought about, and all he’d wanted to do was drink about it with Revy, but, “I wasn’t about to force you to have some conversation when you obviously wanted nothing to do with me!”
“I didn’t know that’s what you fucking meant!” was what she shrieked back at the top of her lungs, so loud that birds were startled and shot themselves out of trees, right into the sky. That night had been a haze to Revy. She had found out she’d been gone longer than she thought, her face was a whole fuckin’ bruise, that there was really no way out and then the first person her gut told her to reach out to was him.
This motherfucker. Loving someone was total bullshit, and it wasn’t even the same someone.
“You–said something, and I was tired, and you didn’t say anything after that, and then fucking Henry told me over text.” Her voice quieted, but the anger hadn’t ebbed. “Then it hit me, and I guess I can appreciate the fucking courtesy as a half-assed heads up even if you’re ashamed about us.”
That had been it, right? Leon was ashamed of having an ex-con as a girlfriend even in some other universe, and he was just being weird, and this had nothing to do with projecting her own insecurities at-fucking-all.
Leon shot Revy a baffled look, his own anger dissipating in his confusion. “Ashamed? Why would I be ashamed?” he asked, and then, after a moment and a slow drag of his cigarette went, “Well, I guess it’s a little embarrassing to have a girlfriend that could kick my ass.”
Revy’s brows took a second to furrow, unsure if she thought that anger would shift into annoyance or–confusion. A mix of both. Fucking christ. “For all the killing and for all the prison because you’re a high and mighty asshole,” she bit back with less heat. “Just because you have his memories doesn’t mean you feel about me the way he did, dipshit.”
Their relationship hadn’t happened overnight, and they had to figure each other out–grow on each other, and she and her Leon had been in a good place. Wasn’t a perfect place. It didn’t need to be perfect to be good.
Twisting around, Revy kept on moving. She needed to move. She was restless, and conversations like this gave her emotional hives, and fuck this place for giving him those memories. They weren’t his.
Leon didn’t respond right away, but he did keep in step with her. There was a lot there to put into some sort of order, something that would make sense to say rather than to just feel.
“My first love, Harry, I told you about him? He told you about him, I mean,” he corrected. “The memories are almost the same, so it’s a bit hard to figure out what was the same. But in my world, Harry got mixed up with some bad people, got mixed up in drugs and stuff, and then he robbed a bank, murdered nine people, including my partner, and then blew his brains out in front of me. And James, his family was practically the Vallo equivalent of the Mafia. And D… well, I’d argue D’s probably ten times worse than you.” Possibly even worse than Revy’s dream self, though he only knew the things Revy had told his other self. She was a piece of work, but in the same way a lot of criminals were; she might have liked her job, but in the end, it was a job and she just followed orders. D was something else. “He might have all the prim manners, and crazy charisma, and could probably charm the pants off the Devil himself, but every person D killed, he did it because he planned on doing it, and someday, if he has his own way, he’ll see every human being on Earth dead.”
He shrugged, and his joke took on a more jovial tone. “So I reckon that ‘psycho murderer’ is probably just my type.”
For fuck’s sake– Revy grimaced, scrubbing a hand over her face. She knew that. She knew most of that, some details varying. She had given Leon shit about it, too. Insecurity wasn’t really her fucking thing and she’d been letting it eat at her like a goddamn dumbass, but it wasn’t like had come from absolutely nowhere either.
She thought of Rock, and how deeply rooted into his morals he had been when he first joined the Lagoon Company. She thought about how they chipped it away, bit by bit, as they exposed him to the underbelly of the criminal world. How good he became at manipulating people, at justifying his own decisions. Revy had thought she was doing him a goddamn favor by opening his eyes to how the world really worked.
Until she realized he was sinking so deep into it that she wasn’t sure if she could pull him out. Not alive, anyway. Sometimes she wondered if Leon would end up the same way the more he stuck around her–because she wasn’t actively taking jobs, but all the shit she’s done didn’t just wash away just because she chose to edit porn or be a stripper’s bodyguard instead.
“That’s the most white boy shit you’ve ever said to me,” was what Revy decided to say, lazily glaring at the trees as they kept on walking. “‘I reckon’? C’mon.”
Leon shot her a grin. “I watched a lot of Westerns growing up,” he said. His grin softened. “Look, I know I’m not your Leon, and I don’t expect you to start, you know, thinking of me like that. But we’re friends, right? I don’t like how fucking weird things have been with us.”
He didn’t know what he’d do if Revy said they weren’t friends and that she didn’t want them to be. Talk to Adora, maybe, about making sure they weren’t paired off again, and hope he didn’t have to see her that often.
Jesusfuckingbullshitchrist, her insides felt itchy. Was that possible? It was like she was developing hives under her skin but that was a dramatic, internal reaction to the fact that this conversation was happening. Maxwell Trevelyan from Orange County would rave about healthy communication or some dumbass fucking nonsense, beaming with pride that she wasn’t going to end this talk with breaking a nose. Didn’t have to be Leon’s nose. Could be the next-person-that-dared-breathe-in-her-general-direction’s-nose.
Revy’s distress didn’t show outwardly, though. It hardly did when it came to shit like this, and instead she wore a carefully constructed mask of apathy. But she reached into her back-pocket for her box of cancer sticks, so that was… something.
“Yeah,” she replied back after an unsettling moment of silence–like, that question shouldn’t have required all the thought it needed but it did. It took a few clicks of her lighter to fire up her cigarette. “Yeah, we’re friends. I don’t hate your guts. But I’m not going to hang around you constantly like we did when I first showed up.”
Ashes were flicked off to the ground.
“I need space sometimes.”
Leon’s own cigarette was nearly burned to the filter by now, and he took a moment to snub it out on the sole of his boot and place the stub back in his cigarette pack. He ignored the twinge in his chest at that. Whatever the arrangement, it was better than whatever shitty dance they were doing now, and besides, it wasn’t like he wanted to spend all his free time with Revy anyway. He needed his own space too.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I need space too,” he said, hiding his uneasiness. And then he forced himself to brush it aside, and shot her a grin. “Drinks this weekend?”
Revy eyed him. It’d been a minute since they'd gone out together. Guess it couldn’t hurt, and it wasn’t like she… didn’t miss him.
Motherfuck.
“Yeah,” she echoed, exhaling smoke and a sigh all in one. Revy went out drinking with friends all the fucking time. It’d be fine. “I’ll text you. Kinda been thinking about getting shitfaced and watching a bad 80s movie at that Starcourt movie theatre anyway if you wanna do that with me.”
“That sounds great. It’s been way too long since the last time I took in some 80s movies.” Die Hard didn’t count. He also hadn’t been to a movie theatre since he’d taken Chris and Count D to go see Space Jam, but that wasn’t here or there. “You let me know when you’re wanting to go, and I’ll be there.”