Chapter Text
Leon finds the guy bleeding out on his doorstep on a crisp Monday morning.
So that’s kind of a bad sign for the rest of his week, he thinks.
“Oh, shit,” he says, when he sees the unconscious guy on his porch. There’s quite a bit of blood soaking through his makeshift tourniquet already, so Leon drags him inside, calls 911, and starts working on putting the fellow back together. Tries very hard not to look at his face, though, because—
Well, he knows that face. He’s seen it in front of a mirror plenty of times before, in fact, and he’s sporting some pretty impressive eyebags himself on account of being a police officer in the grand old city of New York, but this lookalike is apparently working on a beard too. Looks kind of like a wreck, honestly, in a way that Leon, even at his worst, has never quite managed. What happened to you, man? he thinks just before an EMT rushes in through the door and Leon’s Monday morning goes completely down the drain.
“Least Marvin’ll understand if you show up late this time, huh, Leon,” says Detective Helena Harper, teasingly. Leon groans and scrubs a hand over his face.
“I show up late and hungover one time and no one lets me live it down,” he says.
“You showed up late three times,” says Helena. “Twice hungover.”
“Shut up, Helena,” Leon huffs, watching as they load the poor lookalike into the ambulance. “D’you think that guy looks familiar?”
Helena tilts her head towards him, one eyebrow going up. “I thought you knew,” she says. “Maybe he’s your long-lost twin brother. Or your clone.”
“God, I hope not,” says Leon, shaking his head. “Clones always try to kill and replace you. I don’t wanna blow his brains out, that’d be a whole new level of self-hatred.” He pauses, then sighs. “Anyway, I...don’t think he’s either of those things, for what it’s worth. He looks like a mess.”
“I don’t know, he pulled the ‘depressed alcoholic’ look off pretty well,” says Helena. “Hey, you should probably—”
“Not be home for a couple of hours, yeah, I know,” says Leon. “Keep the crime scene from getting disturbed. Can you give me a ride to the station?”
“Sure,” says Helena, gesturing to the cop car that brought her here. “But I’m the one picking the music.”
--
Chief Marvin Branagh is pretty understanding of the whole situation, once Leon explains it to him. All Leon gets for missing the briefing today is extra paperwork, and he’d been planning on riding the desk today anyway unless he needed to shadow that new rookie Nivans. He gets much of the extra paperwork out of the way before his late lunch break, then times out for the hour and heads to the hospital to look in on his John Doe.
All right, technically that only applies to corpses. Guy looks like half a corpse anyway, lying in a hospital bed, so the name is semi-appropriate, but his vitals are holding steady and the blood transfusion worked perfectly. He’ll have to find a new thing to call him soon, he can’t just keep calling him “guy” or “man” or “weird fucking lookalike” forever.
He nips around down to the McDonald’s near the hospital, buys himself a burger and chows down on the bench to satisfy his gurgling stomach. He’s halfway through when Dr. Chambers calls him and says, “Hey, Lieutenant, you should come up here.”
“He woke up already?” Leon asks. “Tell him to wait, I’m having lunch.”
“Yes,” says Dr. Chambers, “but uh, listen, when we asked him what his name was, he clammed right up. Said we didn’t have the clearance to know that, then asked to be debriefed by the highest-ranking officer in the vicinity.”
Leon sighs. “Which is me,” he says. Great. Lookalike is apparently a secret agent. Or just has delusions of being a secret agent, which is a lot more likely. “Yeah, okay, I’m coming up. Tell him he’s got a lieutenant on his way, so unless he wants to bring Chief Branagh down on his ass then he better settle for me.”
“Sure, will do,” says Dr. Chambers. “Hey. Lieutenant?”
“Hm?”
“You better make it quick,” says Dr. Chambers, with a distinct note of exasperation. “Or I might have to tie him down. He really wants to get out of bed.”
--
Leon’s licking the grease off his fingers as he steps inside the room. The guy’s eyes snap to him, and Leon unconsciously straightens out his posture, discreetly tries to wipe the burger grease off on his pants. It’s fine, they’ve had much worse on them. “Afternoon,” he says, walking over to the lookalike’s bedside and pulling up a chair, “I’m Lieutenant Leon S. Kennedy. Also known as the man whose porch you almost bled to death on. What’s your name? Or is that classified?”
The man’s jaw drops, shock written all over his face. “You’re fucking with me,” he says.
“I’m sorry?”
“Where am I?” the man asks, sounding very, very careful not to let his emotions bleed through into his tone. He pauses, then adds, “And what year is it? I’m not gonna ask twice.”
Leon lets out a long, slow breath. Okay. He recognizes this. It’s some kind of Doctor Who delusion. “It’s 2017, sir,” he says. “You’re in Metro General in New York City. I found you on my doorstep, disoriented and bleeding, and called in 911. Now you: what’s your name?”
The guy stares at him. Says, “You’re forty.”
“Way to make a guy feel his age,” Leon dryly says. Forty. Jesus. Hard to believe he’s lived that long, when he didn’t think he would make it past thirty a couple times. He’s sort of proud of himself.
“If I said the names Raccoon City and Umbrella Pharmaceutical,” the man says, “how would you react?”
Leon frowns at him, racking his memory for the names and coming up with absolutely zilch. “I’d ask what the hell you were talking about,” he says. “I’ve never heard of either of those things. One sounds like a video game and the other sounds like an unimaginative name for a start-up. Why?”
The guy presses his lips into a thin line, as if thinking something over. Then he says, with great reluctance, “When you were a kid, what was the name of the orange tabby cat you got for your seventh birthday?”
Leon sucks in a shocked breath. “How the fuck—”
“Just tell me the name,” says the man, sounding almost desperate.
“Garfield,” says Leon. “His name was Garfield. How the hell did you know that?”
“Because,” says the man, “and I am really glad you’re sitting down for this because this is going to sound bugfuck insane, my name is Leon S. Kennedy, my cat was named Garfield, and I had him for fourteen years before he passed away because someone aimed a fucking missile at Raccoon City. I didn’t have the time to get him out.”
Leon’s jaw drops. “You’re fucking with me,” he says.
The man, the other Leon, looks at him with eyes that Leon honestly thinks are a little bit not okay. “I’m not,” he says, and the hell of it is, Leon believes him. Like, properly believes him now, not just playing along with this obviously delusional man. Jesus fucking Christ. How the fuck did his life suddenly turn into this science fiction shit? “For the past nineteen years I’ve been fighting bio-organic weapons on the American government’s behalf, first working in US-STRATCOM and then in the DSO.”
“Okay, US-STRATCOM I know about,” Leon interrupts, wondering what the hell bio-organic weapons even mean and why would he start working for US-STRATCOM, “because those guys fucked up hard on Twitter last week and everyone was shitting on them in the break room. But I’ve never even heard of the DSO.”
“You wouldn’t have, because the reason for them doesn’t exist,” says the other Leon, scrubbing a hand over his face. He looks exhausted. Like. Emotionally. Leon can sympathize, he’s been there in that horrible pit, where nothing makes sense and emotions barely even register on his radar. “The Division of Security Operations was created specifically to combat BOWs. No Umbrella, no Raccoon City, no BOWs, no DSO.” He looks Leon up and down, and says, quietly, “You’re a lieutenant?”
“Took two tries to make it, but yeah,” says Leon.
“I was a cop for a day,” says the other Leon. “Raccoon City was overtaken by zombies, and I had to evacuate with a few other people. Then Congress shot a goddamn missile at the city. I—Shit, I haven’t thought about Garfield in fucking years.” He looks down, hair falling to cover his eyes.
“Honestly,” says Leon, the old grief welling up in his chest, “neither have I. He died at eighteen, the fat ol’ bastard. We held a funeral and everything. I—I can’t imagine how hard it was for you.”
“A funeral,” says the other Leon, choking up.
With anyone else, Leon would be a lot more reserved. But this is another version of him, who lost his cat sooner than he should’ve, who never got to be a cop, who probably never got to meet Marvin or Claire or Ada or anyone who could’ve held him up when things got too bad. Those nevers must haunt him, god knows Leon’s got plenty of them bouncing around his head all the time, so he scoots forward and lays a gentle hand on his alternate’s shoulder, massaging gently. “I can take you to the grave if you want,” he says. “We buried him in my mom’s backyard.”
“I’d—I’d appreciate that, yeah,” says the other Leon. “Yeah.”
He pulls away, then, and Leon lets his hand drop back to his side.
“In the meantime,” says Leon, trying not to let the surreality of this entire situation get to him and failing miserably, “have you got a place to stay?”
“Obviously not,” says the other Leon.
“Well,” says Leon. “As it happens, I have a guest room.”