Petshop of Horrors: The Return

[what_we_dream]

Title: The Return
Series: Petshop of Horrors
Pairing: [Eventual] Leon/D
Rating: G
Notes: Followed by Simple Gifts and The Road Not Yet Travelled part one and part two.

Summary: Two years after D's departure, Leon tracks him down to a shopping mall in Shinjuku. This was, Leon quickly realises, the easy part. What do you do when you've run your quarry to ground?
 

He tracks D down to a shopping mall in Shinjuku, the bright building at once the same at completely different to Chinatown. He’s learned something of hunting D by this time. London and Berlin have taught their lessons well. He no longer throws his weight around like a bull in a china shop, questioning all comers as to the whereabouts of a slender Asian man who dresses like a woman and owns a zoo of exotic pets. Even if he wanted to, it wouldn’t do him any good here in a country where no one he’s met on the street so far has spoken more than a few halting words of English. He’s equally conscious of the fact that he stands out here, far more than he did in Europe; the tall, blond, noisy American. So he keeps a low profile and hunts from afar, searching without seeming to, carefully paying no attention to conversations in English hotels which suddenly turn to discuss That Count and his pet shop.

He sits on the knowledge – D’s location, the pet shop’s new name – for nearly a week, considering. He knows his old self would have been amazed, would have been more than amazed, would have been infuriated by this lack of action. But, he’s learned something of hunting D by this time. His old self would have sought out the finest pastry stores in Tokyo, would have brought Turkish Delight, or Tiramisu, or Crème Caramel. Instead, he begins to visit the local pet stores. He isn’t sure what he’s looking for. But he knows it when he finds it.

It’s a junky little place in Ikkebukuro – just one long thin room – with dirty floors and grimy windows and the stinging smell of clean sawdust to cover other less pleasant ones. It’s jammed full of animals; rodents at the front, rabbits and guinea pigs together in metal-barred cages scarcely big enough for one, hamsters and gerbils crammed in huge extended families, rats and mice sleeping in heaps. The fish come next; garden variety goldfish, catfish, guppies and other minnow-like creatures, with a very few more exotic ones at the end of the double row of tanks. The birds are in the back, possibly to keep the noise down near the till, but if that was the original reasoning it’s no longer a concern. He’s never seen such a disheartening sight as the cages of drooping birds. They are settled low over their feet on tiny crooked perches, heads and tails down and hardly moving, almost silent except for the occasional quiet titter. He feels a flash of anger, wonders if he would have four years ago. But surely D hasn’t defined his whole life. Even before the Count, this pathetic display would have moved him. He hopes.

He almost misses what he’s been looking for, sees it only out of the corner of his eye as he turns to escape the shop. But to his left there is a flicker of a face, of something human, in one of the cages. He turns to look and it disappears, like a 3D illusion in those books that were so popular a few years ago. But he stares, concentrating, harder and harder until he almost crosses his eyes and for an instant he sees it again: a human face- a child’s face- hovering over the smallest bird in a cage of what look to him like sparrows. He blinks and it’s gone, but he knows it’s there. He fetches the store-owner and in an embarrassing and almost impossible pantomime manages to convey that he wants that sparrow, that particular one, and not one of the others. The owner puts it in a little wooden cage for him, the strands so thin they might have been made of straw, the kind that you can buy in Chinatown ten for a dollar back home and smell vaguely of incense and green hay.

It’s late by this time, after six, and he considers returning to his tiny hotel room and visiting the next morning. But he’s bought no food for the bird and besides, the idea of leaving it in its tiny cage sickens him. It’s odd, that after all these years it’s not his personal reasons driving him to confront D, but concern for an animal. Almost as though their roles have been reversed. He smiles wryly.

Leon takes the subway to Shinjuku, holding the birdcage up on his shoulder out of reach of the shorter occupants of the car, and easily elbows his way out of the station and up onto the streets. He follows the path that he already knows by heart. The path to the Neo Chinatown mall. Typical of D to have chosen a new miniature Chinatown for his home. He did the same in London, and in Berlin at least found himself a space between a sort of Wonders of the Orient store and a Thai restaurant.

There is a name three characters long painted above the shop. He can’t make sense of it, but has been told reads Favoured Things. No letter D is anywhere in sight, possibly an attempt at evasion but knowing D more likely owing to some other more aesthetic concern. He looks down at the bird, sitting in its cage dangling from his left hand, beady black eyes staring up at him. He makes a face at it, puts his hands to the heavy doors, and enters.

The shop is both like and unlike the old one. The open space at the front, still presumably used for entertaining the more mundane guests, is laid out completely differently to the old one and the curtained entrance to the back of the store in the opposite corner to its old place. The furniture, while of the same type as the old store – classic Chinese designs with dark wood and rich fabric covers – is not the same furniture as of old. The smell, however, is exactly the same: thick and sweet and slightly heady.

And then standing in the centre of the room is D, who, like the smell of his shop, has not changed at all. He looks up at the sound of the door opening, and his delicate face freezes halfway between blankness and a welcoming smile. His painted mouth opens just slightly in what might be surprise.

“Hey, D,” says Leon, as if nothing’s changed. “Been a while.”

D’s expression has by this time settled to one of careful welcome, a face Leon knows all too well can at any point shift directly into fury. “Detective,” answers D with a slight bow, elaborate iris-patterned cheongsam shifting slightly with a whisper of silk. “To what to I owe this…”

“Surprise?” suggests Leon who, luckily, can be snarky without thought.

“Pleasure,” D finishes with a smile that does not reach his cold eyes.

Leon has been working towards this day, this very moment, for two years. Now that it’s here, he find the shock has numbed his tongue, and his brain. “I was in the neighbourhood,” he manages at last, partially on auto-pilot. He reflects, not for the first time, that it would be better if his autopilot hadn’t been programmed almost entirely by Film Noir. He’s always rushed in gun at the ready, but the only weapons here are brains, and he’s uncomfortably aware that D is therefore the better armed. He’s learned plenty about hunting D in two years, some about the man himself, and maybe even a little about himself; but none of this new knowledge tells him how to deal with this situation, and he flounders. Most of his attention is busy holding his confrontational nature in check. This, at least, is something he has learned.

“I see,” says D. “Do you often take your vacations in Tokyo?”

Leon glowers while he fishes for a suitably reply, but he is saved the need by D’s spotting the bird cage hanging from his left hand. He looks down himself, remembering his gift, if it can be called that.

“Oh, yeah. This is for you. I mean- I found it- him, dammit, and couldn’t just leave him in that cage.”

D, this time with a more apparent expression of surprise in his mismatched eyes, slips away from the table he has been standing behind. He crosses the room in smooth, graceful movements that make Leon’s heart ache slightly. Whatever he might feel for the Count, and rage and perhaps even hate are not necessarily at the bottom of the list, he can admit to himself now that he has missed at least some parts of the man. His graceful movements, easy and free as leaves in the breeze or river water over rocks, are one of those. Leon’s always had an eye for beauty, although generally he applies it to women, and D is undeniably beautiful in all his appearance and movements, if not necessarily in his personality.

D takes the cage from him in his thin, long-nailed hands, flicking the latch up easily and drawing open the flimsy door with one delicate finger. He holds his hand out, and the tiny bird hops out from its perch and onto D’s knuckle in one light movement, little wings fluttering slightly. It chirrups quietly and tilts its head to look first at D, and then to Leon. D runs a gentle finger down its back, regarding it with all his attention. After a few seconds’ careful examination, he looks up to Leon. “There is no great harm done, although he will need some special care, and some decent food.” He turns and, without further words, walks out of the room through the curtained entrance to the back. Leon follows, feeling slightly awkward, and then irritated with himself for it because dammit, who owes who here? D is treating him just like he did back when they first met, cold and distant and with vague interest as one might show in a pet who’s done something clever, rather than as a man he was… what? Friends? Acquaintances with for two years, whose life he saved, whose world he overturned. Steaming, holding his temper in a tight leash, he steps into the back of the shop.

Behind the curtain, as before, is a long corridor of stairs and doors. But directly behind it and to the right is a kitchen, kept in D’s usual impeccable state of cleanliness. The man puts the bird down on the counter, opens one of a set of ceramic jars sitting on the back of a granite countertop. He fishes around in it, asking in a flat voice without turning, “Why did you bring this little one to me, Detective?”

“Leon,” says Leon, glad for something obvious to say. “I’m not a detective any more. I quit.”

D turns around without stopping what he is doing. He is smiling slightly but his eyes are sharp with suspicion and, perhaps, malice.

“Leon, then,” he says, as if memorizing it for the first time, eyes unreadable now. Leon is suddenly reminded of the old fairies, for whom to give away their name was to lay their life in another’s hands. Since meeting D, he’s stopped dismissing fairy tales so lightly.

“At least,” he breaks in lightly, trying to escape this sudden uncomfortable feeling, “I’ve been gone for two years without giving notice. They tend to fire you for stunts like that.”

D turns his back once more, but Leon almost has the impression, almost sees in his face for an instant, a hint of surprise. D scoops out what looks to Leon like a sake glass of small seeds. He puts this down in front of the bird which immediately hops over and begins to devour them with surprising appetite. D looks up at Leon, and there is a hint of gratitude in his face. It is quickly covered by suspicion. He motions to the bird, to remind Leon of his question.

“He looked like he needed help,” answers Leon, crossing his arms stoutly.

“I am sure, judging not least from his appearance, that there were many other creatures in the store where you purchased him that could have been said to ‘need help.’ Why him in particular?”

Leon does not bother to ask how D knew he got the bird in a store. Maybe he figured it from the cage, but even if he didn’t Leon’s long accepted the man’s ability to talk to animals. Sometimes, he misses his scepticism. Or, at least, misses the protection it offered.

“I don’t – he just – he looked like one of them,” Leon manages at last, nodding towards the back corridors, the pets who are more than just pets. D’s eyes narrow slightly.

“Interesting. Then you have perhaps begun to see them?”

“To see-?” From the main room there is the sound of a door opening, and D’s eyes dart over his shoulder.

“Forgive me, De- Leon, but I must see to my customer. Ah, T-chan,” he adds, looking at the ground behind Leon, who swivels rapidly. The totetsu, half goat, half tiger and all temper, is indeed standing there, glaring at him. “Perhaps you could keep an eye on Mr. Orcot until I return?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, simply glides out like a butterfly around the dog-sized animal and out of sight. Presently Leon hears the soft murmur of voices.

He looks down at the totetsu, which is staring up at him. It is undoubtedly an ugly thing, with a flat goat-like face, a mountain sheep’s horns, long fur and tiger-stripped legs. But as he looks at it, he can see something else as well. The creatures is only a foot and a half tall at best. But hovering above it, perhaps four and a half feet in the air, are a pair of sharp, dangerous eyes and the hint of red hair and possibly even rounded horns. Leon looks from one face to the other in confusion. Finally, feeling like an idiot, he asks, “which of you is the real one?”

The totetsu – the goat-shaped one – growls. If the more human half says anything he can’t hear it, can’t yet see a mouth, even. His natural curiosity, however, is distracted by raised voices from the main room, D’s in particular. It is nowhere near shouting, but then again, he has never known the Count to shout. On the other hand, he sounds just about as pissed as Leon’s ever heard him. He sidesteps the totetsu, avoiding a swipe of its claws, and hurries out into the main room.

D is standing with his back to him, facing a taller man who has just come in the door. The man, who Leon does not recognize, is Asian and he suspects he may be Chinese. He is certainly well-groomed, wearing a well-cut suit, and speaking as if he owns the place. At least Leon draws this from the tone, understanding none of the conversation which, he is fairly sure from his length visits to Chinatown, is in Japanese rather than the more lilting Chinese.

The man’s eyes flash over D’s shoulder to Leon the instant he steps into the room, and Leon sees suspicion there, and a hint of malice as well. He walks over to stand behind D, who turns slightly. He has the impression that if it wouldn’t reveal more than it would achieve, D would be glaring at him. The man says something, gesturing at him; clearly a request, or possibly demand, for information. D shrugs and replies, and Leon hears his name in the sentence. He does not hear either detective, police or America, although surely the Japanese have words for at least the first two and possibly the third.

“Who’s this?” he asks, beginning to be irritated by the unintelligible conversation.

“This,” says D in a only slightly moderated version of his “I am Angry” tone, “is Mr. Lau Wu Fei, the owner of this building.”

“Ah,” says Leon, wondering what these two have against each other.

“You are a friend of the Count’s?” asks Lau, in only slightly accented English.

Leon blinks, surprised, and feels his face darken slightly as he considers the question rather than the accent. D is watching him still out of the corner of his violet eye, but he’s not sure what that’s supposed to mean, or for that matter, what D’s told the man. “No, more of an acquaintance,” he answers vaguely, seething on the inside. Friend, acquaintance, enemy. None of them convey what he feels. He doesn’t know what he feels. He’s tracked the man half-way around the world, and he doesn’t know whether he wants to punch him in the face, or… or what? Lau, fortunately, distracts him from his troubles.

“You live in Tokyo?” he asks, and Leon wonders suddenly why this man is pumping him for information. But he at least has nothing to lose by it.

“No. I’m from LA. Los Angeles,” he expands. “I met D there.”

“Ah, then you are one of these loyal customers D has been telling me about,” says Lau with false interest trying to cover a probing stare.

Leon almost laughs. “No. I’ve never bought anything from D.” The count gave him that plant once, but that was a gift for one, and not an animal for another. And it died quickly. It’s odd, how even now he thinks of it sometimes, its tiny white buds shining in the moonlight, and the withered corpse surrounded by petals the dark colour of dry blood. Odder that he should automatically think of the dead plant as a corpse.

Lau looks about to probe the matter more deeply, but Leon’s getting tired of being interrogated, and shifts his weight heavily. D notices, as always, although this is probably the first time he’s ever done anything to forestall an outbreak on the part of the former detective. As it is, he turns back to Lau and says something long and flat in Japanese, in his best “I am dismissing you politely” voice. Lau’s eyes flash, but give away no disappointment.

“It was nice to meet you, Mr. Orcot,” he says, extending a hand. Leon shakes it, surprised to find the grip cold and firm, returns it in kind.

“Sure,” he says. The man nods to D and, turning regally, makes a good exit. Leon whistles, as soon as the doors have closed. D turns and glares finally, but there is no heat in his eyes. It shouldn’t cheer him up as much as it does, to know there is someone D hates more than him, that in comparison he is almost a welcome guest.. “What’s he got against you? Give his wife something too exotic?”

“Do not be ridiculous. He seeks to expel me from this building on the same grounds as those on which you sought to arrest me- futilely, I might add,” D’s eyes sparkle in that familiar haughty combination of mischief and malice.

Leon knows they’ll never catch D on any charges, much less drug-running, prostitution, or even murder. The man is, in some ways, guilty of all three. But Leon has come to understand, much as it leaves a sour taste in his mouth, that D preys upon the weak and ill of society. That he strikes only at those unable to keep to the contracts he imposes, ludicrous though some of the terms may be. Those who meet the worst fate are often, he has had a hard time accepting, those who deserved it most. A dangerous thought indeed for a police officer. This is a hard theory at best to verify, though, as those who lived happily with their “pets” rarely came to his attention.

“Yeah, you look like you’re shaking in your boots,” Leon says.

“De- Leon-” D smiles slightly, meaninglessly, at the mistake, “may I ask why you have come here? Why you have hounded me from city to city? You cannot believe you have the authority here to arrest me, even if you could find the grounds. You would have me believe, in fact, that even were we to return to your country- to your city- that you would not have the power to arrest me. What is it, then, that you want? Surely not to purchase a pet?” He raises a delicate eyebrow in mockery. Leon scowls, mostly to keep from swearing at him.

“Of course not. I’d rather shoot myself in the foot.” Or the head, for that matter. Better than to be eaten alive by a hoard of rabbits, or a giant eel, or torn to pieces by a tiger. “I came… I came to ask you what you are, what you really are? And what all these people here, these ‘pets’ are? And what it is you hope to accomplish, going around and selling them to people when half of them are foaming mad!” He pauses, heart rushing, head hot and confused, and the image of a boat, all its ropes and beams and planks covered in animals. “Fuck, D, I want to know what the hell you’re trying to do!”

D’s mismatched eyes watch him with calm, cruel curiosity, the corners of his painted lips upturned. He is laughing at him, Leon knows, at his ignorance and stupidity and sentimentality, and it makes him want to punch the man in the face.

“That, at least, is clear enough,” says D quietly, and the amusement in his voice is infuriating. “It is not an easy question to answer. You have already heard part of the reply, although perhaps you do not care to remember. But, as you have come all the way here to see me, and as you have given me this pet, I will show you something, in payment.”

Leon is expecting him to go into the back room, or maybe just over to the ornate sideboard against the far wall. He does neither of these things, though. Instead, he walks to the coat stand by the door and pulls a long white cape from its hook, which he slides over his slim shoulders. He picks up from the floor next to the stand a piece of wood on a string, and returns to Leon, still standing by the door.

He allows D to leave first, pulling the door open and slipping neatly out past Leon, close enough that the former detective can smell D’s faint scent, orange blossom and something just slightly muskier but no less appealing. He follows behind less gracefully. D locks the door behind them and hangs up the Closed sign evenly on the handle.

They take the subway, Leon rooting around in his pockets for change until D becomes irritated and drops his fee into his hand, slipping through the pay stall before him. The station is crowded, as always, although there is less of a jam now than there was when he arrives. He follows D easily and notices as he has in the past that, while no larger than the rest of the people here, D slips between them as easily as a fish through water. Leon himself is forced to shove his way through like some sort of overweight, ungainly, unbalanced beast, which further irritates him. They take the red line, Marunouchi the bilingual signs and his pocket rail map tell him, and transfer a couple of stops along to the gold one, Ginza, appropriately. He is aware through all of this, of constant consistent steps behind them. It lingers like a shadow at the back of his mind, and it takes his mind of his mounting temper.

“We’re being followed,” he tells D, as they stand next to each other in the Ginza car, shifting gently back and forth as though on the deck of a ship.

“Yes,” says D. “It’s Mr. Lau. It gives him pleasure to attempt to trap me in illegal dealings, in which I of course do not partake.” D pauses, a scowl marring his fair face. Leon wonders, with a cool feeling in his gut somewhere between apathy and discomfort, when it was he started thinking like this without questioning it. “You would imagine, with all his wealth, that he could hire some sort of private detective, rather than traipse along after me himself.” Leon already knew that D had some very set ideas. He adds, without much surprise, “class consciousness” to their ranks.

They bump along on the subway car for a seeming eternity, watching the stops pass by, until at last Leon is on the verge of demanding where the fuck they’re going, when D cuts neatly through a crowd of girls wearing school uniforms and towards the door, Leon following more awkwardly. They step out of the hot, stuffy car into the only slightly cooler station. But D leads the way through this new labyrinth without any pause, and Leon wonders why it is he trusts the man without any reservations in this matter when he has had serious doubts about his morals in the past and is not at all sure he does not have them still.

They walk through the streets of Ueno, which are significantly quieter and humbler than those of Shinjuku, and D leads the way up a hill towards a park. It’s the first significant green space Leon has seen in Tokyo. They hike up the hill, sparsely populated with evening visitors, and over the other side. There is here a slight, muddy decline that leads down directly to a bulldozed earthen landscape which is now covered in cement. A building site. D pauses on the lip of the drop, and then steps over lightly and strides easily down the muddy embankment, slippered feet leaving hardly any trail. Leon follows him, sliding most of the way. They finally come to a halt next to the concrete foundation.

For a minute they stand there in silence, a pair of men in the setting sun, staring at a flat expanse of concrete surrounded by thin trees and grass. Finally, in a cold, empty voice D asks, “What do you see, d- Leon?”

Leon answers, flatly, “It’s a fucking construction site, D.” He hears D sigh next to him, although whether it’s at the expletive or his answer more generally, he’s not sure. He sighs himself and continues. “But, since you brought me here, and since you’re staring at it with your ‘I’m pissed off’ look, I’m guessing the answer you’re looking for is something along the lines of the horrors of environmental destruction by humans, the injustice of the deaths of the animals who lived here or the trees or whatever, in the name of science and progress and humanity and all those other things you’re so against.” He finishes loudly, staring out over the cement with narrowed brows and dark eyes, waiting for D’s condemnation of humanity, of society, of himself.

Instead, D speaks in a quiet voice and he is so surprised he turns sharply. “I am impressed, Leon,” says D, although he does not meet the former detective’s eye, looking out instead over the gray wasteland. “Had I brought you here four years ago, I certainly would have received the answer ‘it’s a fucking construction site,’” he quotes with some distaste. “Even, I think, I had I done so two years ago, I would have received that answer. You have grown.”

“Or I’ve just gotten used to your crazy ideas,” Leon points out morosely.

“That may be, but the fact that you can think them means that from now on you will continue to think them. Perhaps you are beginning already.” He does not appear to notice Leon’s sharp glance, instead kneels down in the dirt and gently places his hands on the cement, as though it were fine glass he feared to break. Leon, with nothing better to do and prompted by the curiosity that got him into this whole mess in the first place, kneels next to him.

D’s eyes are closed, but even without those most betraying features Leon can see his thoughts are painful. His face contracts tightly, eyes pressed closed so tightly the lashes tremble, bottom lip held tight between white teeth. At last, in a harsh voice so unlike his usual pleasant tones, he says, “the pain is great.”

Leon is not at all sure whether he is referring to his own pain, or that of this place, although he suspects the latter. After a moment D sighs, and his face clears. He opens his eyes and looks to Leon at last, and the former detective sees only exhaustion there. “If you were to guess, Leon, what would you say this land had been before this… depravity?”

Ignoring the adjective Leon glanced around, at the hill behind them, and the grass nearby. “I don’t know. Geography’s not my strong point. Fields?”

“It was, actually, the home of a deciduous forest. A forest which, once, housed a rare species of cicada. The life-cycles of the male and female of the species are such that they are able to meet only once every 221 years. That is a long time, even for my people. With this forest gone, the likelihood of them being able to find each other is… remote.”

He’s just as delicate and effeminate as before, Leon finds himself thinking as he watches D lament the death of the trees, or the cicadas, or both. Delicate, at least in appearance. But his temper, Leon knows, is at least as strong as his own. He is, just like the pets in his shop, not only what he appears to be. Perhaps, not only, but at all.

There is a slippery sliding sound behind them and Leon stands immediately, turning. D does not rise, but looks slowly over his shoulder, face cold in the falling twilight. It is Lau, with another older man stumbling along behind like a clumsy butler.

“Ah, D,” says Lau and gives Leon a hard, assessing glance. He feels himself bristling. “Back here again, I see. Quite the interest you have taken in this development. Have you returned to lay curses on it? Or, perhaps, something more substantial?” His eyes shift from them to run over the building site, and Leon almost smiles at the implication. But, not so long ago he would have been ready to accept the idea of D as an active terrorist, planting bombs or explosives or almost anything else.

“Nothing so sinister as that, Taizu. We were simply mourning a passing.” D rises smoothly and without apparent effort, brushing delicately at his knees with his long thin hands. The man, Lau – Leon is thrown by D’s new name for him – seems confused, and no surprise. He hides it well, but Leon hadn’t been a cop in LA for five years for nothing. “We were about to return to Shinjuku,” D says, as if this had been a mutual decision. “Will you accompany us?”

“Very well,” says Lau, as if it is an inconvenience. Leon glowers, but D is already moving, leading the way up the embankment. Leon ascends directly behind him, following the path Lau and his escort made in descending. It has turned up the wet mud though, and Leon finds himself struggling to keep his footing. Ahead of him, D walks without any apparent issue. But as they are nearly at the summit he puts his foot directly in the wet rut and his leg slides out sharply from under him, giving a quiet yelp of surprise. Without thought, without even time for adrenaline, Leon snaps forward and grabs his elbow in a tight grip, yanks him up and backward before he can fall face-first into the mud. D squawks slightly and glares at Leon as he rights him, rubbing his arm. To his surprise, instead of rebuking him D gives a slight nod, albeit one dripping with condescension. Leon, heart now beginning to pound, chalks it up to Lau behind them. He stomps onward, unaccountably angry.

They return following the same pattern as their original trip. Lau stands between them on the first car, effectively stifling conversation with his presence except when he tries to draw Leon out on his and D’s past. The former detective is filled to the brim with the day’s many irritations and slights, though. The last crushed any good temper he had left, so that he feels the next time D glares at him might just be the last, and he ignores attempts at conversation in favour of glowering. Lau backs off in the second train but if he’s hoping his removed presence will prompt conversation to eavesdrop on, he’s mistaken. Leon tells himself he was never such an idiot as this guy, never such a bumbling, ineffective, irritating presence, but knows deep down that he was; it only angers him further, and he holds the support bar in a death grip, wide knuckles white. D attracts idiots like him like jam does wasps, and he wonders if the man does it on purpose for his own entertainment. God knows D’s enjoyed sneering at him plenty of times in the past.

They reach their stop just in time to prevent Leon taking possibly fatal action against the Count, train lurching to an uncharacteristically sharp halt so that D bumps into him, a soft weight against his chest. The man straightens himself immediately though, brushing his cape straight with a haughty hand. Leon pushes out past him, ignoring the yelp, and strides up and out of the close station into the cooler evening air, where his head finally clears slightly. He turns to look for D and finds the man right behind him, watching him with irritated eyes. Lau is standing in the background, admirably not lurking. They cross the busy street together, and enter Neo-Chinatown. There Lau finally takes his leave, presumably skipping off to his office to record all of D’s sinister doings, as Leon once would have. Leon follows D to the pet shop and tries not to be irritated by every mincing move of D’s, every clicking of his nails, every little feminine twist that sends his silk robes fluttering about him. He doesn’t succeed, and by the time they are at the entrance to the shop even in the cool air-conditioned hallway of the mall Leon feels as hot and tense and furious as he did in the subway.

The pet shop is warmer than the mall, and closer, and the familiar scent reminds him only of all the quarrels he’s had with D, all the times the man has misled him or slighted him or given him that “I’m so superior I don’t know why I even speak to you” look. The one he’s giving him now, cool and haughty and surrounded by his freakish pets. The boiling wave of anger is overwhelming, and he wonders why the hell he gave up his life to chase this bastard, why he gave a damn about his mutant pets, why he ever tried to reason with him.

“You are angry, de- Leon?” says D, and only the slip of the tongue, the tiny mistake, keeps Leon from trying to strangle him right then and there.

“Damn right I’m angry,” he growls, ignores the pets yammering and hissing behind their master. “I’ve spent two fucking years chasing you down, D, gave up my money, my job, my life to find you, and you’re still looking at me like I’m some shit you scraped off your goddamn shoe!” He reaches out and grabs the front of D’s perfect cheongsam, crushing the soft silk beneath his rough fingers, ruining the smooth surface.

“It is hardly my fault that you chose to do so. Indeed, it has been a considerable inconvenience to me,” retorts D coldly, mismatched eyes hard as ice. “Do I not have the right to treat you as I see fit? Have you earned better from me?”

“No one should have to earn goddamn courtesy, D! You treat people like shit, you sell them these things and laugh when they rip them to bloody pieces and eat them!” He shakes D, lifting him easily off the ground as if he weighed nothing, as if his bones were hollow as a bird’s.

“Is it not a rule of your country that every man is entitled to his own opinions?”

Leon’s face twists. “Every man,” he spit back. “And what are you? You said it yourself, you’re no man. I don’t know what the hell you are, but you’re more like a-” he pauses, and even in his blinding rage some old words of D’s come back to him, humans always name that which they do not understand ‘monster.’

“Monster?” asks D, in the same biting, bitter tone. The pet shop has fallen disturbingly silent and Leon can see eyes watching him in the darkness, from behind furniture, through the thick leaves of potted plants and stalks of bamboo.

It’s as if that one word of D’s – his own word from long ago – pulls the plug on his rage, and it drains out leaving him feeling cold and empty and ashamed. Earlier today, just hours ago, he was beginning to sympathise with D. Starting to understand, maybe, the skewed way in which he sees the world. And now he’s almost lost that feeling, has returned to his old self of four years ago. He’s not sure which is the real him anymore. He’s not sure which he wants to be the real him.

“What is it you want, Leon?” D echoes his thoughts unintentionally, reaching out and pushing light hands against Leon’s. The former detective drops the man, and he falls lightly to his feet in a rustle of silk. He does not, for the first time since Leon has known him, move to adjust his clothes. He reaches up instead, and traces the line of Leon’s jaw with a petal-soft finger, nail trailing in its wake. “To kill me?” he asks, softly, smiling again now with dark, shimmering lips. He picks up Leon’s right hand with his left, places it over his heart, rumpled silk almost as warm and soft as his hand. “Or perhaps,” he continues, white teeth glinting in the soft light, voice low and husky, “to have me?”

Leon steps back, pulls his hand out from under D’s, flushing bright and hot. D’s smile widens, but his eyes are still hard, and perhaps now even colder. “Well?” he asks, in a firmer tone.

“I don’t know,” Leon stalls, praying fervently for thoughts to come into his head, to find the ability to put all these emotions together like a jigsaw puzzle and somehow come out with the right answer. “I want to know- to know more about you,” he says, the only phrase that comes into his mind which is worth anything.

“‘To know more about me’?” parrots D. “I might tell more to a lover. Perhaps even to an enemy. But not to an ‘acquaintance,’” he says mockingly.

“Why can’t it just be like before,” Leon asks desperately. Like the shop in Chinatown, which seemed so much more homey, more comfortably than this truly unknown and exotic place. Like the relationship they had had then, pursuer and pursued, officer and suspect. And, sometimes, rarely, something closer to friend.

“My dear Leon,” says D, and the old phrase is more awkward without the detective. “Do not be foolish. Life is not a picture. We have moved on from those days, pretty though they may have been. Our roles are no longer what they were.”

“And they can’t be again? Is that what you’re saying?”

D cocks a thin eyebrow. “What would you do here, in Tokyo? Would you find a job, and come by in the evenings bringing cakes, to interrogate me about my day? Would you bring your brother over, that I might mind him again? Do not be ridiculous.”

“So, what? That’s it? Goddammit, D, that’s not-”

“Not what? Not enough? I owe you nothing, Leon. I have given you two roles that you might fulfil in order to stay here and learn more of me, if that is truly what you desire. Unless,” his eyes glint, and he tilts his head slightly. “Unless, of course, you would like to stay here, in the pet shop.” He spread an arm to indicate the watchful eyes. “As one of them.”

Leon sputters, caught between astonishment and anger. “A- a pet? You’re kidding.”

D smiles darkly. “I do not believe so,” he says sweetly. There is a soft cooing noise behind him, as if in agreement.

“That’s crazy, D,” he says in exasperation. D shrugs.

“Call it what you will. Those are your options. You may choose one.” He says it like some kind of goddamn fairy godmother, wand at the ready to bestow a wish upon him; even as Leon thinks the count gives nothing for free, the memory of that plant returns, red petals fallen in his place. But, even if he is one to occasionally give gifts with no strings, or at least invisible ones, D is no fool. His eyes are sharp as he finishes, “Or…”

“Or I can scram?” says Leon. D tilts his head in accord, eyes watchful. Leon sighs. Whatever he had expected, this wasn’t it. He runs a tired hand through his thick crop of hair. His mind is full of the past two years, of hunting D across three continents, of creatures with human eyes and humans with those of animals. He sighs. “Whatever I thought in the past, I’m not your enemy,” he says eventually. “I’m no Vesca Howell, to go hunting you for decades fuelled by a grudge.” He sees a sliver of emotion flash in D’s bright eyes, but it is gone before he can identify it.

D is watching him closely now, closer even than before, and it might be his imagination but he almost thinks D cares about his answer. He’s standing there, still and elegant as always even in rumpled clothes, white neck rising out of the deep purple collar of the cheongsam. As ever his is face pale and perfect, raven-dark hair framing his face exactly. His mismatched eyes are beautiful, gold and violet; the Temple of the Golden Pavilion surrounded by its irises. He stands apart from anyone Leon’s ever met, above them in every way. He is more beautiful than anyone Leon’s ever known, man or woman, so striking it makes Leon’s heart ache to see him sometimes. He also irritates Leon more than anyone Leon’s ever known, attitude and temper combining almost constantly to set him off. But although he’s by now mostly managed to convince himself that such anger makes him want to strangle the Count, that’s not the only desire it raises in him. If he knew him less well, he would have agreed – especially if he had been a she. But it seems somehow unfair, both to his principles and D, to give in and take something so meekly without winning it. So, skin tingling, face flushed, he refuses. “I won’t be your lover, either,” he says. Not now. Not like this. “And I sure as hell won’t be your pet,” he adds, but whether it is to wipe clean his own traitorous disappointment or the flash of it he sees in D’s face he is uncertain. He thinks he sees amusement take its place, though.

D straightens his cheongsam now, at last, with careful hands, brushing it flat against his thin chest, and Leon has to force himself to watch his face rather than his hands. “Then what will you do now?” D asks, and for the first time there is a note of uncertainty in his voice, script running in a direction he had not anticipated, or perhaps just one he had not desired.

What indeed? D hasn’t proposed moving the shop to a better location for him, Leon, and he can hardly suggest it. Not if he wants D to retain any sort of opinion of him at all, which admittedly is already suspect. But living in Tokyo will be difficult. He has no idea how the working laws apply to foreigners, whether he’ll need a green card or something, has travelled here on vacation status. And even if he could get the papers he has no training for any job other than law enforcement, and no Japanese to get by in a job anyway. He doubts the few English-speaking companies around would hire a lout like him. What do you do, Leon Orcot, when you’ve run your quarry into the ground? Do you give up, and go home, satisfied with the chase? He’s already blown your one realistic chance to stay here with him. He’s turned down a fairy tale for real life, and that’s never given him anything but kicks in the teeth.

There is a flutter of movement behind D, and Leon looks down. It’s a small boy, grey-brown hair hanging long and tangled wearing a dull brown robe which is dirty and tattered. His eyes are very dark. He looks up at Leon from behind D, with a small, inquisitive smile. Leon blinks. “You,” he says, and D turns to regard the boy standing next to him, not even coming up to his hip. He turns back to Leon, eyebrows raised. Leon looks up slowly from the child to D, and knows suddenly what to do. He doesn’t know if it will work out. This is, after all, real life. But, maybe that doesn’t mean it can’t be a fairy tale, too.

“I’ll stay,” he says, not knowing how or where, but knowing it will work out, has to work out. “And I’ll keep an eye on you. Just to make sure you’re looking after him okay.” He has, after all, learned something of D, by this time.

The kid bobs his head. D smiles, painted lips twisting gently upwards, mismatched eyes shining. And, for the first time, Leon sees approval there.