Leo did not, in the end, get his drink.

He'd made it perhaps twenty feet from the stands, aiming for the refreshment table and the blessed possibility of being, for thirty seconds, a person nobody was looking at, when the aftermath of Aria's very public embrace caught up with him in the form of a crowd. The whole stadium had watched the school's golden girl break a record and then vault a barrier to throw herself at the new boy, and the whole stadium now wanted, urgently, to discuss it - preferably with the new boy himself, at close range, all at once.

He was surrounded before he reached the drinks. Questions came at him from every direction - was it true, were they together, had he known she'd do that, what was it like - a wall of avid faces pressing in, and Leo felt the old familiar panic rise, the specific horror of being the most visible thing in a place when all he wanted was to be the least.

"I - we're just friends, I helped her with her ankle once, I really don't -" he was saying, backing up, hemmed in on all sides, when a voice cut through the crowd like a blade through cloth.

"Make way. Council business. Make way, please."

Scarlett Vance.

The crowd parted for her the way crowds always did, and she arrived at Leo's side with her clipboard and her cool authority fully deployed, took in the situation in a single sweep, and addressed the assembled students with the crisp finality of a woman closing a meeting. "This student is being escorted from a disorderly gathering, per crowd-safety protocol. The event is concluded. Disperse to your transport, please. Thank you." And then, to Leo, lower, already steering him by the elbow: "Come with me. Quickly, before they recover."

Leo went, gratefully, letting her cut him a path through the dispersing crowd toward the relative quiet of the field's edge. "Thank you," he breathed. "Seriously, that's twice now you've saved me from being crushed by a crowd. You've got, like, a sixth sense for it."

"I'm observant," Scarlett said, which was true, and did not elaborate on what, precisely, she had been observing, which was him, fairly continuously, for the better part of an hour.

They'd nearly reached the gate when a second voice rang out across the field, bright and loud and not remotely interested in crowd-safety protocol.

"Hey! Hey, where are you taking him?"

Aria.

She came jogging up still in her racing kit, still flushed with victory, a victor's medal swinging at her neck and a victor's grin on her face that curdled into a scowl the instant she clocked Scarlett's hand on Leo's elbow. "The race is over, Madam President, you can stand down. I've got him. He's my guest. I invited him."

"You vaulted a barrier at him in front of three hundred people," Scarlett returned, with icy precision, not releasing Leo's elbow. "He was being mobbed as a direct result. I'm removing him from a situation you created. You're welcome."

"Oh, I'm sorry, was I supposed to file a form first?" Aria planted herself in their path, arms crossed, chin up, the full force of her competitive nature swinging round from the track to this new contest with seamless ease. "Some of us don't need a clipboard to spend time with somebody. He came to watch me. Me. So I think I'll be the one walking him out, thanks."

"He came to support a school athletic event, at which I am present in an official -"

"Official, right, sure, that's why you've been glued to his side all -"

And Leo, standing between them as the two most formidable girls in the school squared off over the question of who got to walk him to the gate, felt something he hadn't felt in all his weeks of baffled, passive bewilderment.

He felt, distantly but distinctly, like an object.

It was a strange and unpleasant sensation, and it cut through his usual obliviousness precisely because it touched the oldest nerve he had. He didn't understand the romance of it - that part still sailed cleanly over his head - but he understood being talked about rather than to, being moved around rather than asked, being a thing two people wanted to possess rather than a person standing right there with feelings about it. He'd spent his whole first life being overlooked, unseen, the boy whose name you forgot; and now he was being seen too much, fought over, claimed, and he was startled to discover that this was not, in fact, the opposite of the old loneliness. It was the same loneliness wearing a louder coat. Nobody fighting over him was actually looking at him either.

"Hey," he said. Quietly. Neither of them heard him, locked as they were in escalating debate about protocols and invitations.

"Hey," he said again, louder, and something in his tone - not angry, Leo was never angry, but firm in a way they hadn't heard from him - made both girls stop and turn.

"I really appreciate both of you," Leo said, looking from one to the other, careful and kind and unmistakably serious. "I mean it. Scarlett, thank you for getting me out of the crowd - that was genuinely a rescue, I was drowning back there. And Aria, congratulations, that race was incredible, I'm so glad I came, I'm really proud of you." He paused. "But I can walk myself to the gate. I promise. I'm not - you don't have to decide who's in charge of me, because nobody has to be in charge of me. I'm okay. I'm just going to head home, on my own, and that's not a snub to either of you, it's just - I'd kind of like to not be a, um. A thing that gets walked somewhere. If that makes sense. Is that okay?"

The two girls stared at him, and Leo watched, with no comprehension of why, two very different expressions of stricken realization cross two very different faces.

Because he'd named it. Without any idea what he was naming, he'd reached into the exact center of the thing they'd both been doing and held it up to the light: they had been fighting over him like he was a prize, a possession, a trophy to be escorted off the field - and he'd just, gently, told them he was a person who would rather not be one.

Aria recovered first, going pink, the scowl collapsing into something abashed. "I - yeah. Yeah, okay, that's fair. Sorry. I wasn't - I didn't mean to make you feel like -" She scrubbed the back of her neck, an oddly Leo-like gesture. "Sorry. Walk yourself. That's cool. I'll just - good. Yeah."

Scarlett said nothing for a moment longer. And what she felt, standing there with her hand finally falling from his elbow, was something far more uncomfortable than embarrassment.

It was recognition.

Because Scarlett Vance knew exactly what it was to be treated as a function rather than a person. She'd spent her whole life being valued for what she could do and provide and carry, being relied upon rather than known, being a role - the President, the eldest, the capable one - that people related to instead of a girl they actually saw. It was the precise wound underneath her entire guarded existence. And she had just, she realized with a cold lurch, done it to him. Reduced him to a thing to be managed and claimed and escorted, an asset in a contest, the very treatment she herself found so quietly unbearable. She'd been so busy not-losing him to Aria that she'd stopped, somewhere, treating him as a him at all.

She hated it. She hated that she'd done it. And she hated, even more, the dawning understanding it forced on her: that the thing that made Leo Leo - the thing she was drawn to, the thing all four of them were circling without quite admitting - was precisely that he saw people as people. He'd done it for her, on the stairwell, with the boxes; seen the person under the function when no one else ever had. And the cruel irony she now had to sit with was that the surest way to lose him would be to do to him exactly what the whole rest of the world did to everyone: want the prize instead of the person.

"...You're right," Scarlett said, finally, stiffly, the words clearly costing her. "That was - I apologize. You're not a thing to be escorted. Go home however you like." She stepped back, reclaiming her composure, but something had shifted behind her eyes. "I'll see you Monday, Evans."

"Thank you," Leo said, with obvious relief, and meant it. "Both of you. Really. Get some rest, Aria - you earned it. And Scarlett - thanks again. See you Monday."

And he walked himself to the gate, alone, unescorted, deeply relieved, and entirely unaware that he had just, in the space of one tired sentence, taught two of the four girls competing for him the first real lesson any of them would learn about how a person actually won him - which was that he could not be won at all, only known.

He walked home in the cooling afternoon, and the relief of being unobserved settled over him like a familiar coat, and underneath it ran the tired old ache, quieter today but still there: that he'd come to this race to do a simple friendly thing, and it had turned, like everything turned here, into a spectacle with him at the center. He just wanted ordinary. A normal friendship, a normal Saturday, a normal life. He kept reaching for it and it kept turning to smoke in his hands.

By the time he got home he'd decided what he needed was to do something for himself, something quiet and grounding and entirely his own, something from the old life that asked nothing of anyone and drew no eyes. Something that had always steadied him, back when the world made sense.

He'd cook.

He'd make himself a proper lunch for Monday - a real one, from scratch, the way he used to, the small private competent pleasure of it. A bento, neat and homemade, just for him. Nobody had to know. Nobody had to make a fuss. It would just be a normal thing a normal person did, a little island of the ordinary in a life that had gone so strange.

It was, Leo thought, rummaging contentedly through the kitchen that evening, planning his menu, the most low-key, unremarkable, trouble-free idea he'd had in weeks.

He had, of course, no way of knowing that in the one-in-seven world, a man cooking his own food from scratch was roughly as low-key as a celebrity walking down the high street handing out gold bars - and that his quiet little homemade bento was about to detonate across Silverleaf Academy with more force than anything he'd done yet.