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Adrian didn’t know how to feel. His arms were filled with a strange pain that he couldn’t place. He had been through pain before, of course, but nothing like this. This was somehow more painful than any gunshot or stabbing or missing pinky toe. Chris was gone, and he couldn’t do anything about it.
His chest began to tighten as he grappled with the fact that his best friend was gone forever, and he had no way to contact him. For his whole life after he became the Vigilante, Adrian’s purpose was to follow Chris’ lead and not ask questions (mostly).
When he had sat down on that couch, Adebayo with the letter in her hand, he had felt a tightening in his chest that he couldn’t explain, and his throat felt like someone was constricting it, stopping him from being able to breathe properly. He had just sat there and ignored it, put it down to being sick or something.
But now, sitting on this bed, no one there to quiz him about animals, he really thinks. About everything. About how close Chris and Adebayo are. Were. About how Chris never listened to his animal facts (that were 95% bullshit). About how his mother warned him about getting too attached to Chris, going on about how much of a ‘bad influence’ he was, whatever the hell that meant. About how Chris never mentioned him in the goodbye letter. About how Chris is gone. Forever.
It almost made him hate Adebayo. Almost. He hated the fact that she could be close to Chris seemingly without even trying to, when all he wanted in life was for Chris to notice and appreciate him. But he couldn’t really hate Adebayo, after all, people might start to think he’s racist, and that’s, frankly, quite embarrassing for him.
Just as his train of thought begins to shift from Adebayo back to Chris’ departure, he hears footsteps behind him, quiet ones, almost as if they were trying to sneak up on him. No. Comfort him. He immediately assumes its Adebayo, as Harcourt doesn’t know what to do when someone’s crying, he guessed, and John was even more emotionally distant than her when it comes to grief and sadness, so he’s an immediate no as well. That leaves Adebayo.
He turns his head to look at her, the right feeling in his throat returning as he attempts to assess her facial expressions, which, of course, he can’t do. His hands begin to roughly press into eachother, attempting to ground him to reality while Adebayo makes her way over to the bed, promptly sitting next to him, a concerned look on her face as she looks at the supposedly ‘emotionless’ man next to her.
Then, and only then, do the floodgates break. Adrian’s eyes begin to well up quickly, spilling tears down his face. A gentle hand wraps around him, coaxing him into collapsing onto her, which he does. Quiet sobs pour from his mouth, as he wraps his arms around Leota’s waist, basically holding her hostage as she returns the hold gently, embracing him like he’s a trembling child, tears threatening her eyes as well, as she tries to stay strong.
A few minutes later, Adrian has stopped crying. All of his tears have ran out, he guesses. Adebayo is still holding him, waiting for him to pull away, which he only does because he doesn’t want to get snot all over her shirt, because that’s really fucking rude to do. They sit for a while, Leota trying to figure out the best way to go about this without scaring Adrian into returning into his ‘emotionless’ shell; this is the first time that any of them, even Chris, has seen him show this type of emotion, and she doesn’t want to make him too anxious to do it again.
“Y’know, he did really appreciate the stuff you did for him.”, she says, knowing that that’s where at least some of his upset came from. Two eyes looked up at her, filled with almost every emotion possible. Fear, anxiety, guilt, grief, mourning. All of it, in the man they all thought to be crazy and sociopathic to the point where some people, mostly Chris, would scream in his face, expecting him not to get upset. Jesus christ.
“Why did he leave me?” A small voice unexpectedly responds, an audible waver disrupting the question. Her heart breaks even more, noting that this child-like state is most definitely Adrian’s brain making up for 35 years of emotional repression. “I don’t know, Ades. I just… I just don’t think he was happy here. He had things in that dimension that were.. perfect, I guess.” Her reply is careful and calculated, making sure that she wouldn’t spark any more guilt in him, as she knew Adrian would take any implication of this dimension being ‘bad’ as his fault.
“Could we not have done something? Was I not good enough? I know I wasn’t his best human friend anymore, but I thought he still liked me enough to stay.” Then, she actually feels a tremendous pang of guilt. It wasn’t her fault, sure, but Chris did say she was his best friend, not Adrian. And she realises now that even though Adrian is emotionally very stupid, for lack of a better word, he is (admittedly) a pretty good investigator, probably due to him having to find various drug lords and crime bosses alone throughout his years alone as Vigilante. And yeah, it didn’t take a genius to see how close her and Chris were getting, for a while even Adrian was asking about whether her and Chris arrived at places together, and he got very obviously jealous when he walked in on Chris and her in the cabin the other day. Now, she realised even more than ever how much of a shitty friend Chris was to Adrian.
Come to think of it, Chris never took Adrian seriously, no matter the situation, despite everyone knowing how gifted a fighter he was, no one ever congratulated or said he did a good job, and all of this information hit Leota like a truck. “No. You were more than enough, Adrian. He just.. didn’t know how to appreciate you, I guess. Trust me, you were the one guy who still liked him after prison, Ades, I think he took you for granted a bit.”
“Dont talk about him like that, he probably didn’t mean to do it, Peacemaker is a good guy..” even now, Adrian is defending Chris with his life. What did Chris do to deserve this? “Yeah, I’m sorry, he is. But he loves you, Adrian, and we are gonna get him back, I promise.”
And just like that, Adrian’s face lit up with child-like wonder. “Really?!” he almost shouts, jumping up from the bed with a huge smile on his face, teardrops still on the inside of his glasses. Motioning for him to give her his glasses, which he does (cautiously), she cleans them with her shirt, wiping the tears from them, before gently placing them back on his head.
“Yeah man, let’s go!”