Work Text:
Leo Tarkesian has a bad dream.
It’s one he’s had before, dreaming of your own death every so often comes with the job, but this one is different.
It’s more vivid, more real, more imminent. It leaves a weird taste in his mouth, like sunscreen and iron and something else he’s never managed to place.
Leo has had enough prophetic dreams during his career that, even after all these years, he can still recognise them instantly.
He wakes up early, letting the adrenaline rush from the dream fade while staring up at his blank ceiling.
He feels like the world that has slowly been slipping from his fingers has finally gotten free of his grasp and fallen to the ground with a sound of shattering glass.
He feels, for one of the few times in his life actually, sort of, at a total loss.
He concentrates on the positives first. There aren’t many. Really, there’s only just one.
It’s a confirmation that Minerva is still alive, out there among the stars.
She said she would be, and Leo really had no reason to doubt her on this, but the confirmation feels nice nonetheless.
Next, Leo starts to focus on the rest, the negative.
Death doesn’t scare him. He’d always thought he would die back in New York. It’s something that he’s made peace with a long time ago. If anything, it’s easier to deal with now that he’s left his home town and doesn’t really have any attachments anymore.
But that doesn’t mean that Leo’s okay with it. He refuses to lay down and die, he refuses to just give up. Leo knows that he’s going to fight whatever kills him. He has to, if not for his pride then to give Duck and his band a better chance at taking the abomination down.
Though his pride is pretty important too in this case.
The prospect of fighting as he is now, powerless and normal, fills Leo with dread.
As a younger man, the final fight he’d imagined was always extraordinary: putting all his strength and might into his final blows, only to go down maybe just mere seconds after having taken down his enemy.
Now weak and fully human, he knows it’ll be nothing like that.
It’s an awful feeling.
Leo eventually gets out of bed, needing to clear his head and find an actual course of action.
As he makes his morning tea, Leo sees Duck Newton walk out.
Too late for it to be work, and, if Leo isn’t mistaken, it should be his day off.
It’s a Pine Guard meeting then. Right on time with his dream.
Leo wonders if Duck had the same dream.
Probably not, or else the somewhat skittish forest ranger would have been at his door warning him, trying to save him or something.
Leo watches the younger man get further and further, silently stirring his tea, mostly lost in thought.
Hopefully not.
Leo considers warning him, but realises he can’t. He can’t risk having Duck back down from his job as chosen.
With Leo’s final days dragging on, Duck’s about to truly, unambiguously, become Earth’s one and only hope.
The illusion of suddenness in Leo’s death might just be enough to kick him where he needs to be to save everyone.