Chapter Text
As the water closes over his head again, he thinks to himself, “Leon, this might be a you problem.”
It’d be good if this kind of thing was out of character, right? It would be good if Leon was the kind of guy who could cry “Why me?” when a small-time dealer decided he needed to get beaten up and thrown off the side of an also-small yacht in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But Leon knows exactly why him - it’s ‘cause of the money he stole - and this is actually the second time this has happened to him. Arguably third, if you count that time he talked his way out of the impromptu swimming part. He’d blame it on bad communication if it wasn’t a different guy every time. He heard somewhere once that if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, well...
And that’s when his vision whites out.
Probably not for that long. Time gets all screwy when you’re in and out of consciousness, he knows, so it’s hard to be sure how long he’s been unconscious when he’s hauled to the surface by the collar of his shirt.
Leon cough, sputters, blinks up into the mashed potato face of some henchman whose name he didn’t quite catch.
“Where's the money, Tao?” he spits.
Leon coughs, seawater dribbling down his chin. “What, d’you think I just put it in a box? What part of ‘off-shore account’ are you not getting, you dip-”
And then the guy forces him down again.
Communications , Leon muses as he thrashes his legs, have truly broken down .
It really is a him problem. Doesn’t take getting repeatedly thrown into the Atlantic Ocean to figure that one out. When he runs into an asshole, he can’t stop himself from saying, “Hey asshole, you’re an asshole.” Like when he went to pick up that pair of custom Banned Jordan 1s Ernesto was fixing up for him, but when he showed up Ernesto had his arm in a sling, and when Leon asked what happened Ernesto said there was a local dealer putting pressure on him to give a shitton of money in protection, so Leon thought, “That dealer sounds like an asshole and he deserves to have all his money stolen,” and now he’s drowning.
If I had the whole self-control thing figured out , Leon thinks as he claws weakly at the guy’s wrist, as all the light he can see narrows to a single bright point, maybe this kind of thing could be productive.
And then he’s going up.
He’s too out of it, just that his ears are full of a horrible wheezing noise and he’s going up, over, and down onto a hard, flat surface, and whoever it is, they leave him there. The rest comes in bits and pieces.
First, Leon realizes that he’s alive, which is a nice surprise. Then he figures out that the hard, flat surface he’s on is the bottom of the boat, and that it’s neither comfortable nor dry, but it’s better than the bottom of the ocean. Then he realizes that the horrible wheezing noise is actually him, trying to breathe, which is a shame. Gradually, he comes to realize that there are other noises: wet, cracking sounds and screams and once a gunshot that makes him curl up in a knot and put his hands over his ears. He’s curious about all that, sure, but he figures it’s probably best if he doesn’t see. Whoever’s causing the commotion didn’t let him drown, so that’s something. That matters. He closes his eyes until it all goes quiet.
He opens them again when someone pokes at him with the toe of their shoe.
“Hey,” they say. “You alive?”
Leon coughs once, wetly.
“Good for you,” they say.
Leon turns his head, peers up into the face of a woman: small, dark, wiry. Familiar, but he’s too waterlogged to remember why.
They’re alone in the boat.
“Where’d everybody go?” he rasps.
She shrugs. “Don’t worry about it.”
So he doesn’t. He just lies there, hugging the deck and watching as she picks her way among dropped weapons and random sprays of blood, looking for something. After a while, she finds it: keys.
“Our ticket out of here,” she says, both to Leon and not to Leon, like how you might talk to a slow wireless connection or a misbehaving cat. She picks up a discarded letterman jacket - pretty sure he saw it on one of the dealers earlier - from the floor of the boat.
Leon pushes himself up a little, immediately flops back down. “How’d you get out here?” he asks.
She drops the jacket over his shoulders with no particular care. “Mind your business.”
So he does. The boat starts up with a roar, and all that noise kinda kills conversation for a while.
After a little bit, Leon finds he can sit up. He can see the shore now, a streak of bright lights on the horizon. It was never that far away, really. He arranges the jacket around his shoulders and decides immediately that he’s going to keep it. It’s cool in like an oversized Big Trouble in Little China kinda way. He can get into that.
He focuses at last on his rescuer, her bloody boots, the muscles in her shoulders, her dark hair whipping in the wind. And he recognizes her at last.
“Didn’t I give you a ride once?” Leon rasps, throat raw with saltwater.
She thinks for a moment. “Oh. Yeah.” She chuckles darkly. “The ambulance.”
She bit him. That’s what he remembers most.
He pulls the jacket tighter around himself, listens to the grunts and whimpers of pain coming from the hold, lets the wind dry his hair.
“No, but…” he mumbles around a mouthful of jerk chicken wrap, “for real, thank you.”
Beside him on the park bench, Shaw’s lost in thought, wiping jerk sauce from her fingertips with a wad of napkins. Her wrap is already demolished, somehow. Jury’s out on this woman being a werewolf, but like, maybe . “Not that every human life isn’t a precious flower or whatever,” she says, “but I didn’t just save you out of the goodness of my heart.”
“Well, yeah.” Leon clears his throat. “So you, uh, you’re working with John and Finch now?”
She doesn’t turn to look at him. “Kind of.”
“How is John? He good? I haven’t seen him in...probably more than five years.”
Her face doesn’t change, her voice doesn’t change, when she says, “He’s gone.”
Leon’s heart dips. “Like...like dead gone? Or…?”
She shakes her head slowly. “We never found out. Just gone.”
“Wow,” he says. “Wow, that’s awful. He was a really, really special guy. Can I, uh...what happened?”
She doesn’t answer. He guesses it’s a difficult question.
“Is, um, is Finch...?”
“Gone too.” She twists the napkin between her fingers, tight.
Leon swallows hard. “Wow. Who’s left?”
With what sounds like effort, she says, “That’s kind of why I’m here. You in the market for a job?”
Leon’s not the kind of guy who has a job anymore. He used to be. He did all of it, went to the networking events and shook hands with old guys who also went to NYU and went to dehumanizing, time-sucking interviews and put on boring-ass suits to go sit in a boring-ass cubicle and lose years of his life chasing down other people’s money.
And then he got laid off. And then his next job turned out to be for the corporate arm of the Aryan Nation. The last day Leon worked a desk job, he only showed up long enough to do some mild-to-moderate embezzling and steal some snacks from the breakroom.
So yeah, Leon doesn’t exactly have a job right now. His job, if he had a job, is locked up in the hold of that speedboat, and that’s kinda over with, the money nestled away offshore, accruing a little and getting fat so he can skim a little off the top before he funnels the rest to Ernesto. Nothing left to do but wait. So yeah, he’s out of work, in a sense.
Leon leans forward on the bench, staring off in a rough approximation of her disinterested stare. He lets his voice go soft, dark, like it might if you were a very cool spy who’s going to totally kick ass at negotiations. “If Finch is gone, you’re gonna need somebody new to be the brains.”
Shaw lets out this big, nasty bark of laughter that makes him jump.
Leon guesses he should’ve known better, but he can’t think what else she would want him for. “...The muscle?”
She wipes her mouth. “This is already a nightmare,” she says to no one. She swivels to face him on the bench. “I need somebody who knows their way around a computer. Somebody who can hack, who can research. Get us paydirt on our Numbers.”
“That’s the brains.”
“That’s dispatch,” she corrects. “I can get you a decent paycheck - not great money, but more than enough to live on - and a place to stay if you need it. You interested?”
Is he? He remembers the last time he saw John, outside that casino in Atlantic City. He’d said that he wanted to do what they did. Help people. Was he talking out of his ass? A little bit. Saving people is hard work and he’s not geared for it. He’s not John. He’s smart and he’s willing, but the second someone sticks a gun in his face, his spine turns to Jell-o. Still, it felt good to help that cool old guy take on that scuzzy casino, same way it does when he thinks of the money he’s planning to discreetly slip Ernesto’s way.
It feels right, to make your own life hard so someone else's doesn't have to be.
Leon takes a slow, deliberate swig of his bottle of pineapple soda. "I'll sleep on it."
That night in his apartment, he doesn’t sleep. He paces, nerves at an all-time high. This happens sometimes, when people almost kill him. He’s pretty OK in the moment. It’s only hours later that his heart starts hammering, his fingers start shaking. But it’s not the water closing over his head that freaks him out; it’s the pattern he can feel falling into. Like the years he spent in the cubicle, chasing down billions he’ll never get to touch. It’s a new infinity, one where he finds a new scheme every couple of months and he pushes it too far and the situation turns on him and suddenly somebody wants him dead again and it keeps happening, over and over, until finally someone does kill him, and he never gets to feel like he did outside that casino in Atlantic City, not ever.
Leon decides he doesn’t need to sleep on this choice.