Leo woke up the next morning knowing he had something to do.
Not a task, not a problem to solve - something warmer than that. He lay in bed for a few minutes in the grey early light, thinking about the dark street and the sound of Aria's voice cutting through it and the sight of four people rounding the corner at speed, and the thing he'd felt when he saw them, the thing he was still feeling now in the quiet morning: gratitude so large it had nowhere to go. He'd said thank you in the street, in the aftermath, when he was still shaking, and it hadn't been enough - had felt thin and inadequate against the size of what they'd done. He wanted to do it properly. He wanted each of them to know, specifically and personally, that he understood what had happened and that it had mattered to him in a way that went far beyond the ordinary.
He thought about how to do it for a while, and arrived at the only answer that felt true: say it, and mean it, and then - he didn't analyze this part too closely, just let himself act on it, which was new - hold them for a moment, the way he would have wanted to be held when he was afraid, the way he'd told Aria it was okay to lean when she was hurt. Not because it was bold or brave or romantic, but because it was human, and he was trying to be a person who acted human, and hugging someone you were grateful to was simply what people did.
He found Scarlett first, before school, in the corridor near the Council office, already moving at the brisk purposeful pace of someone who had somewhere to be and something to carry. He stepped in front of her, and she stopped, and he said: "I've been thinking about last night. I didn't thank you properly. The way you handled that - the reporting, the authority, the whole - you were so calm and you knew exactly what to do and I was so - " he stopped, gathered it " - I was scared, and you came, and I don't know if I told you enough that it meant everything. It really did. So. Thank you, Scarlett. Really."
And then, before the composure she was already reaching for could deploy, he stepped forward and put his arms around her, warm and certain, a proper thank-you hug - brief but real, the way you'd hold a friend who'd done something extraordinary and needed to know you knew.
Scarlett went still.
Not the freezing stillness of the stairwell, the caught-out stunned stillness - but a different kind, quieter and more total, the stillness of a person receiving something they'd forgotten was possible. Leo held her for a moment, the way you hold a thing carefully, and she - slowly, like an old instinct she'd spent years suppressing - let herself hold back. Her hands came up and rested against his back, just briefly, just for a second, before he stepped away.
"Leo -" her voice came out wrong, lower and less controlled than she'd intended.
"I know," he said, with a small smile, sparing her from whatever she'd been about to do to recover herself. "Council protocol. But you came. You reported it and you came, and you knew exactly what to do, and I - I see that. I wanted you to know I see it." He tilted his head. "The whole you, not just the President bit. You."
Scarlett Vance, who had held herself together through things that would have broken lesser people, who had not cried in front of anyone since she was eleven, felt her eyes sting with a force that alarmed her entirely, and managed to say, with everything she had: "You're welcome. Evans."
He nodded once, warm, and went to find Aria.
Aria was on the track, loosening up for an early morning run, and she saw him coming and straightened with the slightly complicated expression of someone who'd been brave the night before and wasn't sure, in the daylight, what it meant. "Hey," she said, a little wary.
"Hey," Leo said. "I wanted to say - you were the first one there. You were running at full speed before I even registered what was happening. You just - you went. You didn't hesitate for a second." He said it the way he said true things, simply, looking at her. "That's one of the bravest things I've ever seen, and I've been thinking about it all morning, and I needed you to know that. So. Aria. Thank you."
He opened his arms, easy and unbothered, the same offer he'd made with Scarlett.
Aria lasted approximately half a second before she walked straight into it, wrapping both arms around him tight and burying her face against his shoulder the way she had at the finish line, but different - not triumphant this time, not performative, just real. Just Aria Blake, who was brave when it mattered and loud about everything else and had been scared last night in a way she hadn't admitted, holding on to someone who'd noticed and said the bravest thing she'd ever seen.
"I just ran," she said, muffled against his shoulder.
"I know," Leo said. "That's the part."
She held on a bit longer than Scarlett had, and then she let go, and she was pink to the ears and blinking too fast and she would absolutely have denied crying to her death, and she pointed a finger at him and said, with enormous unearned aggression, "Don't make it weird."
"I wasn't," Leo said, amused.
"Good," said Aria, and went back to her stretches with the focus of someone having a very normal, completely composed morning, and did not look at him again in case it undid her entirely.
Chloe was in the library. Of course she was. Tucked in her corner, without the Apparatus, which was a change he noticed and found somehow significant - she seemed smaller without it, more exposed, in her oversized cardigan with a book she wasn't reading.
"Hi," Leo said, sitting across from her, and she startled and went pink as she always did, but there was something new in her eyes, a steadiness under the fluster, the faint look of a person who has made a decision. He remembered that she'd come last night - breathless and last, yes, but she'd come, with her phone and her evidence and the camera and her voice cracking over the technical details, absolutely terrified and absolutely there. "I wanted to say thank you. Specifically for - the way you handled the evidence thing. That was you thinking clearly under pressure, which is incredibly hard, and the way you explained it - the distributed evidence, nothing on the device - I could see them calculating and deciding it wasn't worth it. That was you. You did that."
Chloe stared at him from behind her glasses.
"I noticed," Leo said simply. "I saw exactly what you did and how it worked. I wanted you to know that." He stood up and leaned across the table and hugged her, one arm around her shoulders, careful and warm - mindful of the precise way closeness worked for her, giving her the hug without swamping her in it.
Chloe made a very small sound, like someone who had been preparing for a long time for something to arrive and then found themselves not entirely prepared when it did.
"I -" she started. The stutter caught. She breathed through it. And what came out, when it came, was not jargon and not deflection and not a reading from the Apparatus - it was just Chloe, the human part: "I was afraid. But I didn't want to - I didn't want to not be there. For you."
"I know," Leo said, with the particular gentleness he reserved for her. "That's the bravest kind of being there. When you're afraid and you show up anyway." He let her go, settled back, and smiled at her - at the person, not the genius, at the brave frightened girl who'd come in the dark. "Thank you, Chloe."
She nodded, incapable of more, and turned very deliberately back to her unread book, and the colour in her face took a long time to subside, and she didn't mind at all.
Veronica was hardest to find, because Veronica did not linger in public spaces the way the others did, but Leo tracked her down eventually in the far corner of the school's small courtyard garden, sitting on a bench with a kind of enforced stillness that he recognized, by now, as her version of needing to not be looked at. She looked up when he approached, and her expression did the thing it always did - the automatic reach for the mask, and then the faint faltering of it, the one he'd learned to watch for.
"I've been looking for you," he said, sitting beside her on the bench without asking, which he could tell from the slight way she stilled was both unusual and - he hoped - all right. "I wanted to say thank you for last night. The way you invoked the Sterling name - I could see how it landed. You knew exactly what it would do and you used it, and it worked, and -" he paused, because the next part was what he actually wanted to say " - but that wasn't the part that got me. The part that got me was that you came at all. You didn't have to. Nobody made you. You could have stayed in the flat and let the others handle it, and you came anyway, in the dark, for me, and I think that was the most - the most you thing you've ever done, by which I mean the most Veronica thing, not the most Sterling thing." He looked at her steadily. "I see the difference. I want you to know I see the difference."
Veronica was quiet for a long moment.
And then Leo opened his arms, the same invitation, patient, unhurried, waiting for her to come to it or not, with no pressure either way.
And Veronica Sterling, who did not hug people, who did not allow herself to be held, who had built the entire architecture of her life around the principle that you did not open yourself to anything you could not control - after a pause that stretched long enough that Leo thought she might decline - leaned, carefully, like someone trying a thing they'd only read about, and let herself be held.
She was rigid for the first few seconds. Then something in her gave, just a fraction, and she breathed, and the rigidity softened, and for a moment she was just a girl sitting in a school garden at seventeen being held by someone who thought coming through the dark for her people was the most her thing she'd ever done - and who was right, and who knew, and who had said so.
"It was nothing," she said quietly, into his shoulder, the reflex.
"It wasn't," he said.
She didn't argue. For once, she didn't argue.
He let go gently, and they sat for a moment in the quiet garden, and she composed herself with her usual precision, but slower, and the mask, when it came back, sat slightly differently - lighter, somehow, less load-bearing.
"Thank you, Veronica," Leo said.
She looked away. "You said that already."
"Worth saying twice."
And he left her there in the garden, and walked back into the school day, and felt - underneath the gratitude and the residual tenderness and the complicated thing he wasn't quite ready to name - the dawning unmistakable awareness that somewhere between arriving in this world and today, four strangers had become the most important people in his life, and that he felt, toward each of them, something that was considerably more than gratitude for a dark-street rescue and considerably less nameable than anything he'd previously had to deal with.
He didn't name it yet. He wasn't ready.
But he walked through the school with it sitting warm in his chest, and for the first time since he'd woken in the wrong world, he didn't wish, not even slightly, that he was invisible.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Leo woke up the next morning knowing he had something to do.
Not a task, not a problem to solve - something warmer than that. He lay in bed for a few minutes in the grey early light, thinking about the dark street and the sound of Aria's voice cutting through it and the sight of four people rounding the corner at speed, and the thing he'd felt when he saw them, the thing he was still feeling now in the quiet morning: gratitude so large it had nowhere to go. He'd said thank you in the street, in the aftermath, when he was still shaking, and it hadn't been enough - had felt thin and inadequate against the size of what they'd done. He wanted to do it properly. He wanted each of them to know, specifically and personally, that he understood what had happened and that it had mattered to him in a way that went far beyond the ordinary.
He thought about how to do it for a while, and arrived at the only answer that felt true: say it, and mean it, and then - he didn't analyze this part too closely, just let himself act on it, which was new - hold them for a moment, the way he would have wanted to be held when he was afraid, the way he'd told Aria it was okay to lean when she was hurt. Not because it was bold or brave or romantic, but because it was human, and he was trying to be a person who acted human, and hugging someone you were grateful to was simply what people did.
He found Scarlett first, before school, in the corridor near the Council office, already moving at the brisk purposeful pace of someone who had somewhere to be and something to carry. He stepped in front of her, and she stopped, and he said: "I've been thinking about last night. I didn't thank you properly. The way you handled that - the reporting, the authority, the whole - you were so calm and you knew exactly what to do and I was so - " he stopped, gathered it " - I was scared, and you came, and I don't know if I told you enough that it meant everything. It really did. So. Thank you, Scarlett. Really."
And then, before the composure she was already reaching for could deploy, he stepped forward and put his arms around her, warm and certain, a proper thank-you hug - brief but real, the way you'd hold a friend who'd done something extraordinary and needed to know you knew.
Scarlett went still.
Not the freezing stillness of the stairwell, the caught-out stunned stillness - but a different kind, quieter and more total, the stillness of a person receiving something they'd forgotten was possible. Leo held her for a moment, the way you hold a thing carefully, and she - slowly, like an old instinct she'd spent years suppressing - let herself hold back. Her hands came up and rested against his back, just briefly, just for a second, before he stepped away.
"Leo -" her voice came out wrong, lower and less controlled than she'd intended.
"I know," he said, with a small smile, sparing her from whatever she'd been about to do to recover herself. "Council protocol. But you came. You reported it and you came, and you knew exactly what to do, and I - I see that. I wanted you to know I see it." He tilted his head. "The whole you, not just the President bit. You."
Scarlett Vance, who had held herself together through things that would have broken lesser people, who had not cried in front of anyone since she was eleven, felt her eyes sting with a force that alarmed her entirely, and managed to say, with everything she had: "You're welcome. Evans."
He nodded once, warm, and went to find Aria.
Aria was on the track, loosening up for an early morning run, and she saw him coming and straightened with the slightly complicated expression of someone who'd been brave the night before and wasn't sure, in the daylight, what it meant. "Hey," she said, a little wary.
"Hey," Leo said. "I wanted to say - you were the first one there. You were running at full speed before I even registered what was happening. You just - you went. You didn't hesitate for a second." He said it the way he said true things, simply, looking at her. "That's one of the bravest things I've ever seen, and I've been thinking about it all morning, and I needed you to know that. So. Aria. Thank you."
He opened his arms, easy and unbothered, the same offer he'd made with Scarlett.
Aria lasted approximately half a second before she walked straight into it, wrapping both arms around him tight and burying her face against his shoulder the way she had at the finish line, but different - not triumphant this time, not performative, just real. Just Aria Blake, who was brave when it mattered and loud about everything else and had been scared last night in a way she hadn't admitted, holding on to someone who'd noticed and said the bravest thing she'd ever seen.
"I just ran," she said, muffled against his shoulder.
"I know," Leo said. "That's the part."
She held on a bit longer than Scarlett had, and then she let go, and she was pink to the ears and blinking too fast and she would absolutely have denied crying to her death, and she pointed a finger at him and said, with enormous unearned aggression, "Don't make it weird."
"I wasn't," Leo said, amused.
"Good," said Aria, and went back to her stretches with the focus of someone having a very normal, completely composed morning, and did not look at him again in case it undid her entirely.
Chloe was in the library. Of course she was. Tucked in her corner, without the Apparatus, which was a change he noticed and found somehow significant - she seemed smaller without it, more exposed, in her oversized cardigan with a book she wasn't reading.
"Hi," Leo said, sitting across from her, and she startled and went pink as she always did, but there was something new in her eyes, a steadiness under the fluster, the faint look of a person who has made a decision. He remembered that she'd come last night - breathless and last, yes, but she'd come, with her phone and her evidence and the camera and her voice cracking over the technical details, absolutely terrified and absolutely there. "I wanted to say thank you. Specifically for - the way you handled the evidence thing. That was you thinking clearly under pressure, which is incredibly hard, and the way you explained it - the distributed evidence, nothing on the device - I could see them calculating and deciding it wasn't worth it. That was you. You did that."
Chloe stared at him from behind her glasses.
"I noticed," Leo said simply. "I saw exactly what you did and how it worked. I wanted you to know that." He stood up and leaned across the table and hugged her, one arm around her shoulders, careful and warm - mindful of the precise way closeness worked for her, giving her the hug without swamping her in it.
Chloe made a very small sound, like someone who had been preparing for a long time for something to arrive and then found themselves not entirely prepared when it did.
"I -" she started. The stutter caught. She breathed through it. And what came out, when it came, was not jargon and not deflection and not a reading from the Apparatus - it was just Chloe, the human part: "I was afraid. But I didn't want to - I didn't want to not be there. For you."
"I know," Leo said, with the particular gentleness he reserved for her. "That's the bravest kind of being there. When you're afraid and you show up anyway." He let her go, settled back, and smiled at her - at the person, not the genius, at the brave frightened girl who'd come in the dark. "Thank you, Chloe."
She nodded, incapable of more, and turned very deliberately back to her unread book, and the colour in her face took a long time to subside, and she didn't mind at all.
Veronica was hardest to find, because Veronica did not linger in public spaces the way the others did, but Leo tracked her down eventually in the far corner of the school's small courtyard garden, sitting on a bench with a kind of enforced stillness that he recognized, by now, as her version of needing to not be looked at. She looked up when he approached, and her expression did the thing it always did - the automatic reach for the mask, and then the faint faltering of it, the one he'd learned to watch for.
"I've been looking for you," he said, sitting beside her on the bench without asking, which he could tell from the slight way she stilled was both unusual and - he hoped - all right. "I wanted to say thank you for last night. The way you invoked the Sterling name - I could see how it landed. You knew exactly what it would do and you used it, and it worked, and -" he paused, because the next part was what he actually wanted to say " - but that wasn't the part that got me. The part that got me was that you came at all. You didn't have to. Nobody made you. You could have stayed in the flat and let the others handle it, and you came anyway, in the dark, for me, and I think that was the most - the most you thing you've ever done, by which I mean the most Veronica thing, not the most Sterling thing." He looked at her steadily. "I see the difference. I want you to know I see the difference."
Veronica was quiet for a long moment.
And then Leo opened his arms, the same invitation, patient, unhurried, waiting for her to come to it or not, with no pressure either way.
And Veronica Sterling, who did not hug people, who did not allow herself to be held, who had built the entire architecture of her life around the principle that you did not open yourself to anything you could not control - after a pause that stretched long enough that Leo thought she might decline - leaned, carefully, like someone trying a thing they'd only read about, and let herself be held.
She was rigid for the first few seconds. Then something in her gave, just a fraction, and she breathed, and the rigidity softened, and for a moment she was just a girl sitting in a school garden at seventeen being held by someone who thought coming through the dark for her people was the most her thing she'd ever done - and who was right, and who knew, and who had said so.
"It was nothing," she said quietly, into his shoulder, the reflex.
"It wasn't," he said.
She didn't argue. For once, she didn't argue.
He let go gently, and they sat for a moment in the quiet garden, and she composed herself with her usual precision, but slower, and the mask, when it came back, sat slightly differently - lighter, somehow, less load-bearing.
"Thank you, Veronica," Leo said.
She looked away. "You said that already."
"Worth saying twice."
And he left her there in the garden, and walked back into the school day, and felt - underneath the gratitude and the residual tenderness and the complicated thing he wasn't quite ready to name - the dawning unmistakable awareness that somewhere between arriving in this world and today, four strangers had become the most important people in his life, and that he felt, toward each of them, something that was considerably more than gratitude for a dark-street rescue and considerably less nameable than anything he'd previously had to deal with.
He didn't name it yet. He wasn't ready.
But he walked through the school with it sitting warm in his chest, and for the first time since he'd woken in the wrong world, he didn't wish, not even slightly, that he was invisible.
You've reached the end of this chapter