Diary: Prologue

[madimpossibledreamer]

...Cold Stone because that’s the first thing I think of when I think of ice cream cakes, and also DC has a Cold Stone. Is it close to their apartments? No clue.
cut this sentence because it twisted the timeline to the point of near-breakage: But between you and my therapist (and maybe my friends pounding it into my skull) I might finally get through to him, and I hope you can too.

Main Points:
Buffy/Devil May Cry/Resident Evil/Background NCIS Crossover (Hold My Heart)
Chapter Summary: Leon starts reading the diary he was given for Valentine's.  And yeah, some of it hurts, but his boyfriend's also a complete sap and Leon's not complaining.
Word Count: 830
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Leon/Xander
Warnings: Mentioned Abuse (Tony Harris is a bastard as always)

         I’d like to start at the beginning of the weird, but nah, there’s a few things before that you should know. I don’t like talking about them, but I’m not talking about them, I’m writing about them, so maybe that’ll help? I’m hoping this will be done by Valentine’s, assuming I don’t procrastinate. Which, let’s be real, is a big assumption. I’m bad at this stuff. Do I get a gold star for trying?
         Note to self, Leon thinks with a smile, pick up gold stars the next time you go grocery shopping. It shocks him every time you play along with his jokes, but hey, nobody got your sense of humor either. The least you can do is play along in return—and you do find it funny.
         I’ve told you some of this before, but not in detail, which is the letter but not spirit of the request, and I really am trying. And not trying to be trying. So, quick stuff. I used to be known as Alexander Harris. You know my so-called dad was abusive. Most of it was verbal and emotional, but if he was super drunk, it could occasionally get physical.
         While he’s at it, he should ask his therapist about productive ways to channel this anger, because boy oh boy does he need it and he can’t just keep tensing up when Xander brings it up in person, because his sweetheart has noticed, and he definitely can’t walk away every time to cool down and maybe go for some target practice.
         A lot of it was, well. He never wanted kids. Lucky it was just me. I mean, I’d like to say I’d totally stand up for another sibling, but I can be kind of a coward when it comes to this stuff. Maybe I’d surprise myself. I’d like that.
         You asked for this, Leon reminds himself. And yeah, sure, Xander didn’t have to go this far, but you’re the one that kicked this off.
         And you can’t not know, his brain continues, because to effectively support him the way he needs, you have to know, and you want to be there for him, one hundred percent.
         So I was a waste of space. I was a drain on money. I got used to trying to get out of the way as much as I could so he wouldn’t notice me. I think I got so mouthy because I wanted to talk back but couldn’t at home, so I just did it everywhere else.
         Kennedy smiles sadly. Yeah, he could see that. And he’d never have considered himself lucky that he was an orphan.
         If you guessed this was the reason for my less than stellar self-confidence, ding ding ding, you earned yourself a gold star, too. We all know not to let these voices creep into our head. We know not to listen. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me’? Yeah, that’s crap. Physical pain is temporary. Words burrow into your skull and make a nice nest there.
         He’d known, or guessed, some of this. Not the details, though. He half feels like a voyeur, like Xander’s scraped out his heart or his brain or both, and is offering them like some sort of gruesome trophy, but he’d wanted to know, and Xander did want him to see.
         ...Maybe he should write a diary in return. It might be shorter, with most of it from his adult life, but he does like the reciprocity aspect, something, sadly, it seems like Xander’s not used to.
         The whole family are alcoholics. Some of them are, well, more, uh, sociable drunks than others? It’s this whole thing. There’s a reason the entire family is kind of shunned. Rory is kind of interesting, in some of the wrongest ways. He’s a taxidermist, so who knows how the hell he makes the kind of money for vintage cars and a James Bond-esque life. For a while when I was a kid, he was James Bond. He made it out of Sunnydale. Contacted me once, because he heard I was working at an international women’s school and did I need any help. I told him no.
         It makes an unfortunate amount of sense that he probably hadn’t learned about consent at home‒not that Leon has confirmation of that yet.
         There’s Dave. He was the not-so-cool uncle, but I think I was Judgey Mc Judgerson unfairly. He was a plumber, an honest one, did his job, and wasn’t drunk on the job. Kind of boring, but maybe that’s something to aspire to, when you’re a Harris. No clue if he made it out of Sunnydale, but I hope he did. Honestly I probably wouldn’t know. Not like he’d go out of his way to contact anybody. Probably would go to the next closest town that needed a new plumber and settled down.
         Maybe Leon could get Hunnigan on that. Off the clock, of course; she wouldn’t appreciate company resources being used on the clock like that. Not that Xander would probably contact him, but it’d make him smile to know.
         Carol Harris and her daughter Karen. Last I heard she married some guy in Ottawa. She’s a little goofy, but, uh, aren’t we all? She’s also great, and no, I have no idea why she keeps going back to the family name. If I were her I’d just take the name and run with it, even if I and theoretical man that isn’t you because hell no would I divorce you, you’re stuck with me unless you don’t want to be, got divorced.
         “We’re both in this for the long haul—even if it takes some work,” Leon responds, and then feels a little silly for talking to a diary. Well. Not that Xander would judge him.
         There’s Rigby. He lent me his tux once, which surprised the heck out of me because I think I’d spoken to him once before that? He didn’t make it out, because I then got said tux mailed to me when I was in Africa and didn’t get it for three months. Apparently they’d held the will reading without me. I’d be surprised they even found the thing, except apparently according to the letter he left the will with Aunt Carol, which was smart, because if anyone would make sure that thing was executed properly, it was her. Shockingly it doesn’t fit anymore, so no, you don’t get to see me in my high school prom tux. (That was sarcasm. It doesn’t translate so well over paper.)
         Leon grins. Hopefully he’s having a little fun with this, too.
         There’s others, but apparently they’re so bad Tony Harris doesn’t talk to them anymore. One of them did get arrested, but Willow and I got caught trying to figure out for what and we were too scared to try to go back and look again. My money’s on assault or drunkenness or maybe theft. The rest were, according to gossips at the Sunnydale Hospital before it ceased existing, probably were due to debt one side or the other couldn’t pay.
         Those, sadly, do seem like smart bets.
         I’ve seen the wedding photos. Mom does look in love. I don’t remember any of that, though. What I remember is the ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ parent who was regularly too drunk to even recognize my voice.
         Oh, honey.
         If anyone made it out, I hope it was Mom. I hope she divorced his deadbeat ass and is living somewhere far away from him, happy and free. She We both deserved better, weird as that is to say or think. But maybe if I keep repeating myself eventually, just like the painful words, it’ll sink in. It’ll probably be harder, though, because these words are soft, so maybe they’ll just slide off rather than sinking into flesh.
         Maybe Xander’s picturing fishhooks or something. For Leon, though, that invokes zombies. He shudders a little.
         Most of the time when you’re actually drunk, by the way, you’re adorable, at least around me. You get affectionate or flirty or both, and you’re still really observant, surprisingly, but you mostly get really goofy. It’s your ‘on the way to getting drunk’ where you can get mean, but even then you tend to pull your punches. I can’t say I don’t flinch but it’s mostly instinct.
         It’s clear Xander has no idea how to end that thought, so he just leaves it there. To be fair, Leon’s not particularly sure what to do with it, either. It’s not as easy as it sounds, he knows, his boyfriend trying probably to come up with logical reasons why he shouldn’t let this bother him, it’s completely different situations, when he shouldn’t have to do that. It sounds like Xander likes when he’s being particularly affectionate and goofy. Maybe he can work on doing that sober, too. Or more like ‘instead’.
         Maybe you’re part of the ‘deserving better’. I’d like that. The nurses would say it, sometimes, if Tony messed up. He did his best to keep up plausible deniability, but he was a sloppy drunk, so sometimes he wouldn’t be careful enough. I used to think it was my fault, too, for not being careful enough. For getting caught. Gibbs says kids shouldn’t have to be careful around their parents, though, and, well, he’s a parent, so he’d know, right?
         If the point of this is to earn extra cuddling time, Xander’s doing really well. It’s not, though. It’s to fulfill that thoughtless promise Leon demanded, because he was so terrified of another Ada. The least he can do is witness it.
         I’ve thought about you, police-you, coming and saving me from that. Not for long. Because it’d make the age gap way weirder. Four years is still a lot when I think about it. I’d have been in junior high when you were in high school. It would have been huge back then, back when two years was a big deal for Oz and Willow, and Buffy dating a vamp was, like...okay, let’s be real, that’s a bigger age gap than most of us will ever encounter in our lives, but still. That’s, like, Pleistocene at the very latest, comparatively.
         Even when he’s talking about something awful, Xander still manages to make him smile. He thinks about it too, sometimes. Hopes it isn’t too weird for Xander. Then again, weird is kind of what they do, so maybe it’s fine.
         It’s less weird as we get older. Gets diluted in the years we currently have, maybe. It is weird to think that you could have bought underage me a drink. Not that you would. It’s hard to picture, and maybe I grew up faster and you grew up slower, but you said that police-you was really straight-laced, so you probably wouldn’t have done that. It’s just weird that you could.
         The thought hadn’t occurred to Leon before now. Now that it has...yeah, it’s weird.
         But maybe you did bust down that door and rescue that little kid after all. This is going to get a bit metaphorical, but bear with me, okay, and if it’s too weird just pretend you didn’t read it or something.
         This is going to be interesting, one way or another.
         You’ve still got that bright-eyed, eager baby cop in your brain. I’ve still got the scared, hurt little kid. They’re not the entirety of what we are anymore, but they’re not gone entirely, either. Just ‘cause that’s not the ‘you’ people meet doesn’t mean they’ve been discarded. They’re still here, hoping that this time it can be different, this time it doesn’t have to hurt, this time we can save everyone or maybe just ourselves.
         Leon’s cheeks are wet, he realizes detachedly. Years of training says to ignore that, pretend it’s not happening. Krauser would mock him for it.
         But maybe he’s still a sensitive guy, and maybe that’s not a bad thing, because he’s pretty sure that smearing on the ink, now dried, page wrinkled, is tears, favoring the right side of the page, for some reason. He wipes the beginning away with a smile, but doesn’t do so again, just keeps on reading.
         And it can’t. We know it can’t. We know we can’t save everyone. But, uh, you’ve heard this story, right? The Star Thrower? Starfish washed up, covering the beach, and a little girl throwing them back. “You can’t save them all. You can’t make a difference.” We can make a difference for that one. Sure, we can’t save everyone, but is that an argument against saving anyone? Nope. Because every person we save is someone who wouldn’t have made it if we listened to our cynical heart and said ‘nope, not our problem, we can’t make a difference so why even try?’
         God, Leon loves this man. He’s just openly weeping now and he doesn’t even care. He’s going to read this over and over. Hell, he might just make a copy of it and put it in his office.
         And just like that, um. This isn’t going to be perfect. We’re going to fight again, probably. But we can make this home. We can make this safe, as safe as it’s gonna get. So you can tell the baby cop that he’s done exactly what he joined the police force to do—help people. And I can tell the little kid that it’s fine, that ‘home’ doesn’t have to mean ‘hurt’, that he deserves love. It won’t be easy. I can tell you that from experience. It’s hard to convince him it’s fine, that he doesn’t have to be afraid.  But he's not a complete blockhead.  If I keep trying, I'll get through to him eventually.
         Leon is going to kiss Xander senseless when he comes back. And, uh, Cold Stone has ice cream cakes, right? This deserves celebration of some sort. Xander’s probably going to be a bit bewildered, then embarrassed, but he’s also going to look proud when he realizes this was all from the diary—no, the prologue.