The Day Grace Met Leo

“You look tired.”

“Kind of you to say, officer.”

“No, I’m sorry, you’re- Sorry. Here, I got you this.”

“...Thank you, officer. You really didn’t have to.”

“Oh, I know it’s just cold out, and you looked tired, and I see you here sometimes, and I just thought… Um. Can I sit?”

Grace scootched timidly, feeling like she couldn’t say no. Leo sat, sipping his own coffee and breathing through his teeth like that would fight the cold.

“My name is Leo, by the way. You don’t have to call me ‘officer.’”

“Okay, Leo.” Grace sipped her coffee and stared across the park.

Leo noted the stare, the ice blue stare as clear and cold as the frozen pond to their left. Her dark hair was a mess, implying what nobody knew- that her hairbrush was lost somewhere in the wreckage of her old home. Leo saw her there on the same bench with her ice blue stare, always wearing the same baggy jeans and worn boots and oversized coat that had once belonged to her dad, so she was told. To her, the edges of the coat were tinged with green light, matching the string that wrapped around her wrists and led straight to Leo’s heart.

It was that green string that brought Grace to this bench day after day to stare and try to ignore the magnetic tug of the green string to Leo, who walked the streets in her peripheral vision, doing whatever it was cops in a silent town do. She wasn’t happy this very tall, very cozy young cop was connected to her by the fate decided by the strings.

It meant she had to kill him.

The next day, Leo came, shuffling in his long coat with his face tucked in a scarf. He handed her coffee and sat without a word. He never asked her name or to talk; he just came and had coffee with her, and when they were done, they said goodbye, and he went away. Thus, a routine was born.

Every moment Grace waited for her sign, and after days of silence, it finally came, and she felt a sickness as she’d never experienced before.

“I’ve got a case.”

“Mm.” She sipped.

“In Discovery. Nothing big has happened there since the disappearance of that young woman 10 years ago, and… well, it’s Discovery. No one ever expected anything big to happen there again. But it turns out there were two murders there a few weeks ago. I’ll be going out there every evening to help. The cops down there don’t know what to do with a case this big. Pretty interesting, huh?”

“Mmm.” She shivered.

The next day Grace didn’t come to the bench. She stayed on her floor with her back to the door, sobbing and tearing at the strings wrapped around her wrists like handcuffs.

Leo still sat on the bench and wondered. He thought all sorts of things, created all sorts of stories about where she may have gone, and he worried.

What if she hates talking so much that I scared her away, and now she hates me?

She could be dead in her house, but I guess someone would have called us at some point about that.

I hope she’s safe.

Why would she leave like that? I thought we were friends… In a strange, quiet, companionable sort of way. At least, I thought that with enough time, we could become friends. Or…

Maybe she’s from Discovery.

Maybe she killed those people.

Leo laughed out loud at the thought.

Leo was correct.

Grace ran out of food.

She ventured to the grocery store on the corner, the one whose sign badly needed repair and currently spelled out GROY, with the G blinking on and off repeatedly.

“Ladies and gents, welcome to G-g-g-g-g-g-groyyyyy.” Grace whispered with an absent smile to herself, her mind wandering to the ancient and long-dead short-form humorous content which inspired her small declaration.

She wandered the aisles aimlessly, pushing a cart with a wobbly wheel, not knowing what she actually needed. Her dead roommates usually did the shopping in Discovery.

The green string suddenly felt like weights on her hands, and it pulled her around to see the very thing she’d been dreading.

“Leo.”

“Hey!”

She turned tail and walked quickly away, hoping maybe he’d just let her go, but ohhh, she knew he wouldn’t. He was too worried.

“Wait, please!”

The string pulled her to stop.

Leo caught up, and she turned around slowly. He was out of uniform today, and his hair, usually calm and collected, looked like he, too, had left his hairbrush at the scene of a murder. Maybe he had. His eyes, so opposite to Grace’s in their warm brownness, looked nothing but concern and relief commingled at her.

“...Sorry, but… are you planning on living off saltines alone, or are you very sick?”

“I am very sick.” Grace coughed unconvincingly.

Leo didn’t buy it, and his eyes showed it.

The string screamed TELL HIM and her head screamed back I HATE YOU.

“I… don’t know how to shop.” She smiled a little.

Leo grinned. “Can I help you?”

The string, that evil entity, told him yes.

They wandered with more purpose now, and as Leo chatted away, the grip of the green string seemed to loosen, at least enough for Grace to temporarily forget about it. Enough that she chatted back a little bit too, told him her name, and even enough to laugh at something Leo said. When Leo heard that laugh, he felt as though summer sun had broken through the winter overcast and shattered the roof of Groy and shone upon him with all its warm fuzziness and brilliance.

He thought, as they wandered for much longer than they really needed to, that it was interesting how much you can miss a sound you’ve never heard, or a person you barely know. Leo couldn’t see Grace’s string; he had shut his eyes to all strings, even his own, as he felt it was an invasion of people’s lives and something akin to reading ahead in the book of his own life. And besides, he didn’t want his whole identity to just be about one thing. But despite not seeing the string, he felt something of it, a tug to her, a sort of familiarity, like when you see a place in a dream that you don’t know but somehow you can navigate without outside direction.

All Grace was thinking was that she wanted to listen to him talk forever.

That was, until Leo mentioned his case in Discovery.

Instantly, the string snapped tight around her wrists, and the walls flew back up, which was actually the opposite of what the string's effect was supposed to be. That was something Grace thought about a lot, mulled over, pondered, and yet never understood. But it was the most infuriating, frustrating, destructive aspect of her life.

Grace’s string was just really, really bad at its job.

Leo noticed her shut down and respectfully didn’t talk as much as they went to check out all of her real food. They walked out of Groy, and Grace stared thoughtfully at the cart full of grocery bags.

“I can help you take them to your car,” Leo said, scanning the parking lot as though her car would jump out at him as the right one without any prompting. Leo may have been a little overconfident in his knowledge of Grace, which he was beginning to realize, especially when Grace said: “I walked.”

Leo stared at her for a moment, his lips pressed together. “...Me too.”

Grace smiled a little and shrugged.

“Y’know, Grace, I’m surprised we’re still alive.”

“Me too.” Grace started picking up the grocery bags and stacking them on her arms.

Leo, unprompted and rather unwelcome, hefted up the remainder of the bags and nodded for Grace to lead the way. The broken string thought this was a very joyous development.

They walked in silence, Grace focusing on taking one step at a time whilst her heart beat furiously. She processed how the rest of the day might go. Leo would go inside her tiny home and help her put the groceries away. He would try to talk to her. He would try to stay. She would reach for the knife in her miscellaneous drawer and hold it against him when he tried to push forward. Really, he would kill himself, just like the others did. The ones the string thought were safe kept pushing forward. Really, it wasn’t her fault. Really, he had to know that.

Leo, too, was walking in anxiety.

Leo had reached a discovery in… Discovery. He hadn’t shared his findings on purpose for a moment like this. He knew there had to be more to the story. There was always More. Self-defense, maybe. Or… well, there had to be More. In a world where death mattered little, murder was still a crime worthy of years in prison and a visit with the Council, who would subsequently decide your strings’ fate.

Unfortunately, if all went as planned, Leo wouldn’t find out what More was. If all went as planned, Leo would die in the next 20 minutes.

It began just as Grace thought it would. Both Grace and Leo felt as though they were balancing on the edge of a precipice. They moved quietly and quickly as they unloaded the groceries, feeling tense. Leo’s mind was racing; he didn’t know what was going on, but he knew there was an unnatural tension and a darkness in Grace’s face he wanted to fix immediately. Grace just waited, her hands poised to pull the drawer open and draw the knife as soon as the provocation was given. Both of them watched each other warily and sadly.

Leo felt, without having a clue why, that any relationship they had built over the past weeks was in the process of dying, and somehow he felt that meant Grace was in trouble. Leo didn’t know what was going on, but he wanted to protect Grace. He wanted to know. He wanted to help.

Grace really did not want to kill Leo. Her ice blue eyes searched, begging him silently to just stay quiet and stay alive and leave and never ever give her a reason to draw a knife.

The groceries were put away. Leo leaned against the counter on the opposite side of the kitchen, feeling a little bit more peaceful as the bright winter sun broke through the window.

“Can I make you dinner?”

The tension broke like shattered glass, but the anxiety remained. The green string loosened and tightened over and over, not knowing what to do, which was not surprising because the green string was really very bad at its job.

Grace tilted her head. This was a new one. Why wasn’t he coming for her? Didn’t he know what she’d done? Didn’t he know who he was supposed to be? How could he go off script like this?

“Leo…”

“I’ll go if you want. I just thought maybe you didn’t really know what to do with all this food, so I thought maybe I could show you?”

“Why?” The string hovered uncertainly, listening for a reason to believe Leo wasn’t safe.

“Because I know what you did, Grace.”

Well, thought Grace, with heartbreaking resignation. There it is.

The string had a knife in her hand in a moment, squeezing her wrists so tight she cried out in pain.

“WOAH!” Leo leapt back and flung up his hands, eyes wide.

Grace’s hands shook horribly as she held up the knife. “Stay there,” She gasped. “Don’t come any closer, Leo. I really, really don’t want to kill you.”

“Okay!! That’s good to hear! That’s a start!” Leo responded, his voice high with panic. “Why don’t we put down the knife then, huh?”

“...I can’t.”

Leo stared at Grace. He wasn’t afraid of her, but he sure didn’t understand her, and he had a feeling interrogating her right now was the wrong move.

“Well… gosh, this is dramatic. Put the darn knife to use then.”

Grace’s panic was interrupted by a projectile in the form of romaine lettuce, which fumbled into her hands.

The green string evidently had no idea what to do with this predicament, so it let her cut lettuce. And as Grace chopped, she listened.

At first, Leo ranted, and Grace let him because she had just pointed a knife at his chest; she owed him that much. He told her about how he had figured out the Discovery case, and snapped his fingers when he remembered he had to give her back the hairbrush from her old apartment. He told her he didn’t know why, and at that moment he did not want to know. But had she ever been to Italy? Because he had, and no one made spaghetti like the Italians, obviously, but he learned their secrets from an old Italian grandma he boarded with.

In between every word from Leo, Grace’s mind turned and fought its own battle against a broken string.

When all that was left to do was wait for the noodles to finish boiling, Grace gave Leo her full attention. It was strange: sitting there on the counter with full control. She didn't know what to do with herself, so she just watched him, and she settled into a different kind of quiet. She was comfortable, and it was so… different.

The last thought she directed towards the useless green string was kudos. You finally got it right.

Leo had his own expectations for what the morning would bring. He expected that a few blocks down from the park, past Groy, there would be an empty house. He expected her to be gone, and he would never have the chance to give her back her hairbrush.

He went about his routine like nothing was different, resigned to the fact that everything went back to weeks before, pre-Grace. But he bought two coffees anyway, and only realized he had done this subconsciously when he was 20 steps away from the coffee shop and headed to the park. And then Leo got sad. He went to the bench where they always sat and sipped his coffee and sighed, observing the baby green sprouts beginning to bravely push their heads out above the frost. He sighed again. He missed her soft, quiet presence already.

“Leo.”

Leo was on his feet in an instant, his face creased by a huge grin.

“Grace. I got you coffee.” She smiled, warmly, and again Leo felt like she was sunshine on the bitter winter day. “I thought you were going to leave.” He said, laughing as though that was the most foolish assumption mankind had ever made.

“Well, I’m going to-” Never had Leo been so upset to be right. “But I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Well,” Leo sighed. “That’s good to hear. That’s a start.”

Grace took a deep breath, gathered her strength, and began. “I’ve gathered that you have closed your eyes to strings, right? Well, mine is green. Green is universally meant as the color for family. When I came to this town, as you know, I was on the run, but I was also desperately trying to follow my string. I realized soon after I arrived that it led straight to you.”

Leo processed for a moment. “...Family?” He asked, like his next question was going to be We’re not cousins, are we?

“Yes, mostly, but there are many facets of its meaning, and it’s always been debated- but I digress. Safety. It means safety.”

“Well, that’s great!” Leo perked up, his face flushing as he realized what she meant. “Doesn’t that- I mean, you get that you’re safe here now, right? With me? You know nobody really cares about what happened in Discovery; they’ll probably forget-”

“No, Leo,” Grace said, gently and sadly. “My string… It leads me astray. It lies. The people that it led me to before, they-” Grace choked and sobbed. Leo reached for her for the first time, and Grace was quick to pull away. “They hurt me, Leo. And my string made me hurt them back. I’m a killer. You’re a cop. Whatever that means nowadays doesn’t take away from the fact that we are ill-fated, considering the string or not. But I am what the string has made me, and I don’t know how to be anything else. I don’t know how to be what you deserve.”

Leo groaned in exasperation, startling Grace. “See, this is why I never wanted to see my strings! I didn’t want them to become all of me; I wanted to be able to see beyond them. Every Chaser I’ve ever met seems to see nothing in themselves but the color of their string, and it’s- it’s sad! Because, Grace, you’re so lovely,” He turned to her earnestly, and she stared at him, wide-eyed and disbelieving of what she was hearing. “I’m with you. I want to help you. I want to protect you. Will you let me?”

“I- I don’t know if-”

“Grace,” Leo took her hands, and she let him. “Let me help you. Stay.”

The string was gone, this Grace knew. She could do anything, stay, go, explore the world, visit Italy, it was all so enticing. There was a world out there and self to find, domestic trouble to get into that had nothing to do with knives or family, people to meet who were good and evil comingled, things to see unburdened by pale gray winter clouds, but…

Grace didn’t want to.

“Okay.”