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It was a little pathetic, but Leon didn’t know how to be himself without D around. Jill would say it was very pathetic. Leon had learned not to humor any interest of hers in his love life, though, because she wore smug very well. And she was his one work friend, and thus very difficult to avoid.
And therein lay the problem: Leon didn't really have any friends. He’d always been a workaholic, and while he really did want to catch D doing something wrong, D had been the first friend he’d made in ages. The first person he’d wanted to spend time on in ages. And he actually got around to it, because Leon could walk over to the petshop in the mornings and pretend he was working overtime.
Without realizing it, Leon had organized his entire life, free time and work hours alike, on Count D. Now that D was gone, Leon was stuck orbiting around nothing.
When Leon went on a walk, his feet would guide him toward Chinatown. When he read a newspaper, he would comment on an article, only to look up and remember that he was alone. Alone, in his apartment, steam silently rising from his eggs. And weekends. Those were the worse. Those had been his Count-and-Chris days for the past year and a half.
So Leon looked for D. He looked and he looked and he looked.
Jill took to calling him Charming, whatever that meant.
He took a sabbatical and, when that wasn’t enough, turned in his badge. His parents would call and nag every once in a while, but he was able to save Chris from institutionalization, so he’s pretty much immune from parent guilt for the forseeable future.
Sometimes he felt the cloying weight of D’s gaze on the back of his head, but he would turn around and no one would be there, just him and an empty street.
He went to every stupid godforsaken place D had ranted about. He started getting in contact with wildlife protection scientists and travelled from devastated population to devastated population, feeling like the last person left on earth. Count D, as Jill liked to say, was his “person.” Leon would deny to his dying day that he got that Grey's Anatomy reference, but she was right. D wasn’t even completely human, but he was the only "person" Leon had ever found. They weren't the same species, but Count D was his population.
When he was a kid he’d read stories about Peter Pan and Neverland. Children are heartless and selfish. Count D, in his ship, went off to kill them all. But why did he have to go, when no one was chasing him? Was he pulled? The wind? Leon spent a day reading up wind directions and meteorology which ended in a weird week in Canada before he reminded himself that it was a fucking ship, and why would it obey the traditional laws of nature when it’s also a boat that can fucking fly?
Whenever he thinks about that, Leon remembers tears beading on a perfect face, whipped by the wind, darkening the wood of his porch, rain rain rain rain the sky would never be clear again he can’t leave or get further because he’s beat back by the falling rain.
You would think that there’d be reports somewhere, of a huge fucking wooden ship sailing the seven skies – or would it be the one sky? – but, no.
Someone foisted a cricket in a cage on him in a bustling marketplace in the middle of who-knows-where. He named it Jimminy. Maybe it would be as lucky for him as it was for Mulan. But the years began to pass, and all of the luck in the world, and some nights, when he smoothed out the deep creases in Chris’ drawing of them as a family, he thought that maybe he was never meant to find D. Maybe he would have to just wait to die and then meet up with the Count in his pirateship in the sky, off to Neverland, this time, if they let him in.
Whatever fate had in store for him, he couldn’t keep wandering the world. Everyone ran out of cash, eventually, and he was running out of hope.
****
Chris’ life returned to normal after leaving San Francisco, which was just weird. He actually had to do structured things like go to school and do homework and invite people over in order to hang out with them (it was much nicer when he was just living with them, like with Pon-chan and T-chan).
His brother was really bad at email, always said there was nothing to say, so Chris finally trained him into getting and using a twitter and at least posting the name of whatever town he blew into. As a Christmas present, Chris begged his parents to get him one of those posh phones so not being near a computer was no excuse. Jill used twitter, too, which was nice. She watched a lot of TV shows and tweeted about them between taking the mick out of his brother and asking him about school.
Chris sent him postcards, once a month, like clockwork. He sends them to a PO Box around wherever Leon is supposed to be. He wondered if Leon’d received any of them.
After not speaking for so long, it was weird to externalize so many of his thoughts, in speaking, in writing. Things were so much easeir at Count D's.Chris' memories of the shop were limited to the smell of cloying incense and his brother’s gruff happiness and labyrinths, labyrinths, labyrinths. Winding, winding, past where the small shop should go, and behind this door there was ?. Behind the door there was ??. Behind a door there was a haze. Jill told him it was a petshop, when he brought his dreams to be a vet. She said it offhandedly, like she was mentioning the obvious, but. He didn’t remember any pets. That wasn’t why he was planning to be a vet. He just liked animals. He didn’t remember any animals.
One day, Leon realized the solution to all his problems was to open a bakery.
“@whereintheworldisleon What,” said Chris. He had made Leon’s account. Somehow Leon had not gotten the Carmen San Diego reference.
“@soundofsilence A bakery,” affirmed Leon.
The thing about their twitter conversations was that Chris could never tell if his brother was joking.
Chris didn’t hear anything from Leon for a month after that. There was a picture on his twitter of him, most likely drunk, doing a thumbs-up with a world globe with a dart in it. Chris had no idea what that meant. His brother had a bushy beard and his shirt looked like it had seen better days, but it was nice to see a current version of him. He was not a phantom from the internet.
****
Chris checked the mail one day, and there was an envelope with a letter from his brother in, along with a picture of him in front of a bakery. It was postmarked from Japan. What.
Hey Chris,
As you can see, I’m in Japan! Yes, yes, very surprising, I know. Jill knocked some sense into me and told me that people just don’t start bakeries, let alone bakeries that do well enough to draw regionwide attention, which is the point of this whole thing. Wait, I never explained this, did I? I realized hitchhiking around the world was getting me nowhere and decided that if fate wanted me to see D again, the best shot I had at finding him while standing still would be at a bakery. He supposedly moves every two or three years, so I figured if I worked at a highly rated bakery, if he was ever in the same city as me, that’d my best bet to run into him.
After, like, a week of begging and heckling, I found a reasonably popular bakery that let me be cashier. You know how D never gets up before 11 if he can help it – if I work from noon and on if he ever visits, I’ll be there. I can’t really tell all of these freaking cakes apart and everything’s written in japanese, but I’ve also been drawing customers with the whole being blond and Caucasian thing, so. I don’t think they’re going to fire me. Wish me luck?? I used to watch a lot of yakuza films and anime porn in high school, so don’t worry – I mostly get the gist of what people are saying to me.
Speaking of people, I have never felt tall until this year. Everyone is shorter than me!! I feel like one of those dragons during that blackout in SF that was probably a mass hallucination. There are plenty of babes here, but, well, you know. Whenever I see a certain cut of black hair… it’s just never who I want it to be.
Don’t worry about me, though. Someone told me once that Japanese beer was better than American and boy, were they right.
Talk to you later little bro,
Riion Orukoto (or so they call me nowadays)
This was weird, but at least he looked happy? Chris didn’t think Leon would ever catch D – he had the entire world to hide in, how did people ever catch Carmen San Diego – but he hoped that maybe staying in a new place would help Leon settle down, become someone again. It was hard to think of Leon as anything but a detective, but whatever worked out for him in the long run. Maybe in a few years Chris could do a year abroad in Tokyo at some point – there were programs for that in high school, right? –, to check on his older brother.
Leon Orcot @whereintheworldisleon
Teh besst thing about this place is the raemn stalls!!!
Chris wished Leon would stop posting pictures of pastries and bread. Chris always saw them late at night, hunched over his computer, and that was the worst time to be hungry. Also they make him start to miss the Count, too.
He didn’t remember very much about his year of silence, but whatever snippets he can remember all have the Count somewhere in them, going with him to the park, smiling at his brother, being patient and kind. The Count didn’t have to take Chris in, but he did. And they really had felt like a family, the three of them, just as much as his adopted family was. It was a nice fantasy to think they could have that again.
Heya Chris,
I caught a criminal! Woohoo! The Japanese cops weren’t too pleased with a gaijin bringing in their perp, but I KNEW that guy that always bought blueberry pound cake on Saturdays was dirty! This one ended up much better than that domestic abuse case I spotted and reported last month…it’s really useful when people around you don’t think you can understand their language, you know? There are some days I miss the job, long hours and all, but this whole civilian thing is working out much better than I ever thought it would, and I guess I’ve proved I can keep it as a hobby, eh?
How’s school going? How’re Mom and Dad doing?
Catch you later,
Leon
******
Leon had been working in the shop for 3 years. He would never find D, but he did find a sort of happiness in being around everything D loved. Sometimes in the break room he closed his eyes and breathed in the oversweet scent of pastries and imagined he was in D’s shop.
But then, one day. One day, someone called in an order to a pet shop owner in Chinatown. A pet shop owner named Count D.
He peeked around the corner, and sure enough, there he was. D. It was really him, with his impassive smile and floral dresses and – Leon took a deep breath – that incense. He clutched the box of cake to his chest. He would walk in. Any moment now. His eyes started to sting. He realized he hadn’t blinked for the past minute. What if the Count disappeared when Leon took his eyes off of him?
He steeled himself and walked into the shop. Everything was set up the same, with the ornate chairs and tables and couches draped with animals. The air didn’t smell or feel like Japan, in here. It smelled like the shop in SF. It smelled like home. He sat down in his typical chair and looked up at D, who was staring at him.
“Are you going to offer me any of that cake, D?”
A fraught pause. “Of course, detective.”
Leon pulled the crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. “You forgot this, when you left. And I’m not a detective any longer.” His fingers itched for a cigarette, but he’d been trying to quit.
D leaned over his shoulder to see Chris’ drawing and a few tears splashed onto the paper.
Leon thought seeing D again would feel huge, with swelling music and birds singing and flowers blowing in between them for no reason. Well, that’s a lie, he didn’t actually believe he would ever see D again, but that is what he saw when he imagined it. Instead, it was like a weight had lifted from his shoulders. He felt instantly normal, like something clicked and he no longer felt like existing involved going through the motions, and relaxing meant living and breathing and contentment rather than just sitting still and not doing work.
So Leon didn’t hug D, or tell him that he missed him, or punch him, or burst into tears, but he did kiss him. At length.
The next morning, Leon had work. He was oddly fond of his job, so who knows, maybe he would keep it even after it had served its purpose, maybe he wouldn’t, but he hadn’t potentially quit yet, so. Leon started to regretfully leave, but he stopped at the door.
“You have to stay.”
D stayed silent.
“Chris is planning to take a year in Tokyo soon. He wants to be a vet.” D smiled fondly at Leon. “So if you could just stay, until then. I think you should.”
“I think that is ample reason. And if you’re good, the next time I leave I may even take you with me.”