Dive into your creative stream
hey fellas! it's real life! means you get sick sometimes 🙃
am sick
leo has spent his entire life curating an image for himself. the Leader with the plan, who always knows the right thing to do, who always has the exact words his brothers need to hear at just the right time. a firm hand to guide, an ear to listen, a voice to inspire hope.
even when he stumbles, it’s controlled. quiet in such a way that not even his brothers, who share a roof and food and clothes and blood, realize it. leo doesn’t fall apart, he can’t, because the foundation that crumbles brings down the entire house.
maybe it’s your outsider perspective that gives you insight. you see it in the way he doesn’t bother to wrap his still-bleeding knuckles after hours in the dojo, silently sliding over the last slice of pizza to his orange-clad baby brother, forgoing fun nighttime outings in exchange for more training, suddenly excusing himself from conversations of harrowing night patrols so that no one can see the hiccup in his breathing growing and growing until the memories threatens to engulf him.
the way he rejects himself over and over is so familiar, a mirror reflection that moves in time with your own movements, and oh, it hurts to see it. but you do it anyway because you have never met someone more worth looking at than him.
maybe he sees it in you too—or maybe he just needs something, someone, to notice him, even if he would rather die than admit it. but eventually, he allows you to silently bandage his bleeding knuckles and kiss the spaces between his fingers until their trembling ceases and the shudder of his breathing quiets. when you find him pacing at night, restly walking between his brothers bedrooms, he stops resisting you as you gently pull him back to bed and drown out his racing thoughts with the sound of your own rhythmic heartbeat.
you don’t fix him, you wouldn’t dream of it because you love him and loving isn’t the same as fixing—but you kiss his scars with as much tenderness as his lips, and something in him heals each time.
he confesses to you one sleepless night under a hazy new york sky that he doesn’t know the difference between loved and being used.
i don’t either, you tell him. but i would like to learn.
This shit made me giggle like a maniac😂
ralph when jack comes to terrorize him at his soccer game the minute choir practice is over: