binge ; leo series

He's six years old.

Blood gushes from the split skin on his knees. There's a lot of it, more than he's ever seen. Which is probably not very impressive because he's only seen blood a handful of times before now. It's warm where it slithers down his skin, soaking through the gauze his teacher has wrapped around the jagged wounds. She's shaking, muttering frantic somethings under her breath and barking orders to the small crowd that's formed around them. She's tearing up and Leo finds that strange because she's not the one who's hurting.

He is. He thinks. Or maybe he just knows he's supposed to be. His ankle looks wrong, all swollen around his sneaker. It's gone an ugly purple color in some places and those definitely ache. "What were you doing, hun?" She's trying to sound sweet, but people get bad at lying when you catch them by surprise. There's more exhaustion and exasperation in her tone than she meant there to be. Leo is such an inconvenient tragedy.

His head falls to the side and he furrows his brows. He searches the sky for answers but finds only brilliant blue and accusation. "Please don't tell my mom."

That must have been a stupid thing to say. Her lips part, tasting words and choking them back down. There's a long moment where her gaze flits from her bloodstained hands, to the state of his ankle, and back to Leo's face. "Leo, this was incredibly dangerous. You could have died. Of course your parents need to know what happened. They'll want to make sure you're okay."

That's not true, but correcting her is more trouble than it's worth.

She takes a moment to compose herself before, "I just want to understand what happened. How did you even get up on the roof?"

"I climbed?" How else was he supposed to get up high?

"Yes but-" She sighs, moving to run a hand through her hair before remembering their current state, "fine. Did you fall or did you jump? Some of your classmates think they saw-"

"I just wondered what it felt like to fall."

Apparently that question had a right answer, and that wasn't it.

He'd broken his ankle - well the doctor used the word shattered which made him feel pretty cool. He was going to need surgery to fix it, so from six years on he was a little less human than he'd been before. Full of cold, hollow metal and very little regret.

His parents weren't even angry at him until a few days after everything when a stranger in a fancy suit knocked on their door for a 'wellness check'. He talked to his parents for a while and then tried to talk to Leo privately but his Mother told him he was feeling too tired so he figured she was probably right. The man was a Keeper, like them, so they invited him to stay for dinner while Leo slept. He had a hard time drifting off with all the laughter downstairs because it was only three in the afternoon.

They pulled him out of that school the very next morning.