Petshop of Horrors (Leon/D)

[puella-nerdii.livejournal.com]

Title: Desist
Author: puella_nerdii
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 692
Warnings: It has Leon in it, so language. Lots of language.
Prompt: Petshop of Horrors, Leon/D: Insistent Leon - "Long hard day"
Summary: They don't tell you about this in the Academy.


They don’t tell you about this shit in the Academy, Leon thinks. Sure, they give you a whole bunch of phrases to say and procedures to follow and forms to fill out, but this—this feeling when your heart plummets into your stomach and all the acid starts eating away at it, this thing that grabs you around the neck like a vice and chokes all the air out of you, the horrible thoughts crawling to the front of your brain, they don’t tell you about that. They don’t tell you how much your hand shakes when you tell the bastard holding a pistol to a little kid’s head to drop the fucking gun now and they don’t tell you about the drops of sweat that slide straight down your forehead and land in your eyes. They don’t tell you that even after years on the force, you still feel like jumping out of your skin and running back home to your mom when you hear the gun discharge. And they never tell you that some days, the kid will look at you with big hopeful blue eyes and mouth “help me” while he twists and writhes in the crook of some psycho’s arm, and that some days, that kid just looks too damn much like Chris. Your hand seizes up then, and they don’t tell you what to do when that happens. And then some cocky fuck fresh on the job decides to play Mr. Badass Cop and fires too soon, and when his bullet goes wide, there’s no procedure for you to follow, no rules to obey. You just—stare. You’re rooted to the spot when the bastard jumps and tightens his finger around the trigger. You scream at him to stop, but the report of the gun drowns it all out. But you can still see. You still see the trickle of red dripping down the side of the kid’s head, the blankness seeping into his cornflower blue eyes, the way his mouth falls slack.

“Fuck,” Leon mutters. He lets the door to D’s shop slam shut behind him.

“You’re here early.” D sets some spiny-looking lizard down behind the couch and sits down. Leon falls into the cushions next to him.

“Yeah. They gave me the rest of the day off.”

“Oh?”

He leans against the wall. “We got into a shootout today. Small-time drug dealer, shouldn’t have been anything big. But then he panicked and took a kid hostage, and a rookie in my unit panicked. The dealer shot the kid.” He looks at his hands. “And shit like that happens, you know? People die.”

He half-expects D to interrupt, but the Count is silent.

“And you have to deal with it. You don’t have to like it, but you have to—deal. But sometimes you have to wonder. Why this kid? Why today? Stuff like that.” The back of his throat burns.

“The world has never been particularly forgiving,” Count D murmurs. “Right and wrong...” He shrugs. “Right so rarely wins out, it seems.”

“I know. It’s fucked up.” Leon wills his voice not to crack. “Everything’s fucked up, and…”

The words die before he can give them shape. He just grabs the front of D’s kimono and rests his head on the Count’s shoulder. He doesn’t cry or anything like that. He just stays there, breathing in the mix of flowery tea and animal musk that surrounds D wherever he goes. D doesn’t try to push him away, and if his fingernails bite a little too hard into the back of Leon’s head as he weaves his hand into Leon’s hair, he’ll deal with it. And if D’s surprised when Leon moves first this time, dragging him down to the couch and covering him in hard, bruising kisses, he doesn’t say anything. If D’s surprised that Leon’s grip on his shoulders is tighter than usual, squeezing until D’s pale skin reddens, he keeps it to himself.

“It’s crazy,” he says when it’s over and he’s yanking his pants back up. “The world’s crazy.”

“I believe we’ve found something on which we agree, my dear detective.”

Comments

[laylah.livejournal.com]

Oh, very nice. I really like the depth that Leon has here -- it seems like in a lot of the Petshop fic I've read, his biggest problem is whether he's going to sleep with D, and I love how you turn the focus to the deeper problems he faces.

...also you're making me think that I should come up with a couple of Petshop prompts for next round. ^^

[puella-nerdii.livejournal.com]

Thank you! ^^ I agree with you about the Petshop fic, and I really think it's an injustice to Leon's character, because there's a lot of stuff going on there, you know? He has a hard job, and there are definitely moments in the manga where you see that it really affects him sometimes.

...if you come up with the prompts, I will probably write them. >> Uh. My OTP is totally showing, isn't it.

[froggie.livejournal.com]

This is very moving in so few words.

[puella-nerdii.livejournal.com]

*prr* Thanks!

[white_aster]

I love seeing fics where D and Leon have an established relationship and yet are still so recognizably THEMSELVES. The way that this is not just about them flailing at each other, but is about the rest of the world, too. <3!

[puella-nerdii.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'm glad you really got a sense of those elements this time around, because I had so much fun playing with them when I was writing this.

[misura.livejournal.com]

I loved the fact that you put the characters in an established relationship here, and the way you made Leon depressed and a little broody without making him seem pathetic or whiny.

[threewalls]

Ow, for Leon. It's really interesting to see him beyond his pursuit of D, as a cop having a terrible day-- and his short tension fuse, that he tries to control, but he breaks and D's stability is there to crash against.