The nurse's office was empty.
There was a note taped to the inner door - CALLED TO THE GYM, BACK SHORTLY, a minor emergency two buildings over - and so Leo found himself easing Aria down onto the padded examination cot in a quiet, sunlit room with nobody in it but the two of them and a faint smell of antiseptic.
"Well, this is great," Aria announced, to the empty room. "The one time I actually need her. Typical." She was still talking too fast, still bright, still filling the silence, but Leo noticed she'd stopped putting weight on the ankle entirely now that no audience remained to perform fineness for. The grin had gotten a little less manufactured. "Guess I'll just sit here and slowly turn into a skeleton. Tragic. Star athlete, felled by ankle, found years later -"
"Or," Leo said, crouching to look at the injury properly, "I could just do it."
Aria blinked. "Do what?"
"Strap it. It's a basic sprain, by the look - it needs a compression wrap and some ice and to be kept up." He glanced around, spotted the supply cabinet, crossed to it and started, unhurried, gathering what he needed: a roll of elastic bandage, an instant cold pack, a folded towel. "I know how. I've patched up worse than a rolled ankle. If you'd rather wait for the nurse, that's fine too, but you'd be more comfortable strapped."
Aria stared at him as he came back with an armful of supplies and pulled a low stool up in front of the cot. "You - know how to do that. A first-aid thing. You."
"Me," Leo agreed.
"But you're -" She stopped. He watched her catch herself, watched some carefully-policed thing rise up and get swallowed, and what came out instead was a half-laugh. "I dunno. I've just never seen a guy do, like. A practical thing. Boys here don't really - they don't do stuff. People do stuff for them." She said it lightly but there was a real puzzlement under it, the same bafflement he kept triggering in everyone, the sense of a script being ignored. "You keep not doing the thing you're supposed to do."
"I get that a lot," Leo said wryly. "May I?" He gestured at the ankle, and waited - he always waited, never just took - until she nodded. "Tell me if anything hurts more than a dull ache. Don't tough it out. I need to know if something's actually wrong in there, and I can't tell if you're hiding it."
"I don't hide things," Aria said, automatically, reflexively, the way you'd swat a fly.
Leo looked up at her, mild, unbothered, and said nothing at all - just held her eyes for a beat with that calm noticing attention of his - and Aria, who had just been caught in a lie so total that even she could hear it, felt her face go warm and looked away first.
"...Okay, maybe a little," she muttered. "But it's a survival skill. You'd hide it too if your whole - " She stopped again. "Whatever. Just do the ankle."
So Leo did the ankle.
And it was, on the face of it, the least romantic activity imaginable - a clinical, careful, methodical strapping of a swollen joint - and yet the small sunlit room seemed to grow very quiet around it, and very close. Leo worked the way he did everything, with an unhurried gentle competence, his hands sure and careful, lifting her foot to rest on the folded towel across his knee, checking the swelling with a touch so light it barely registered, beginning to wind the bandage in smooth even turns. He was entirely focused on the task. He did not notice - he genuinely did not notice, being constitutionally incapable of imagining himself as the cause - that the girl above him had gone utterly, uncharacteristically silent.
Aria had stopped talking.
This was, for Aria, roughly as alarming as the fall had been. She talked. It was what she did, it was how she filled the world and kept it at the comfortable surface level where nothing could get in, a constant bright stream of noise that meant nobody ever got close enough to the quiet underneath. She did not do silence. Silence was where the dangerous things lived.
And yet she could not, for the life of her, find a single word, because all of her attention had narrowed down to the impossible fact of being taken care of - the warm weight of her foot resting on his knee, the absurd gentleness of his hands, the top of his bent head as he frowned in concentration over getting the wrap exactly right, getting it right for her, taking this much care over something as unglamorous as her swollen ankle. Nobody took care of her. People celebrated her. People wanted things from her - her speed, her wins, her reflected light. Nobody had ever just knelt down and quietly, competently, with no audience and nothing to gain, made sure she was alright.
Her heart was going like she'd just run the four hundred. Her face was on fire. And the great horrible novelty of it, the thing she had absolutely no defense against, was this: she was not performing. There was no crowd. He wasn't watching her be Aria Blake. It was just her, sitting still for once, being looked after, and being - she realized with a lurch - seen. Not the idol. Her.
"There," Leo said, tucking the end of the bandage neatly. "How's that? Too tight? Should be snug but you shouldn't lose feeling in your toes."
"It's -" Aria's voice came out strange. She cleared her throat. "It's good. It's really good. You're - that's really good."
"Good." He settled the cold pack against it, wrapped the towel around to hold it, and looked up at her with a small satisfied smile - and then paused, the smile flickering into something more attentive, because even Leo could not entirely fail to notice that the loudest girl in school had gone pink and quiet and was looking at him very strangely. "Hey - you okay? You've gone quiet. Is the pain worse? Do you feel faint? Sometimes after a fall the adrenaline drops and -"
"I'm fine," Aria said quickly, and then, because the word fine had been doing a lot of heavy lifting in her life and she'd just spent ten minutes being gently called on it, she amended, flustered: "I mean - I'm not, like, dying. I'm just. I dunno." She gestured vaguely, helplessly, at the strapped ankle, at him, at the whole strange quiet moment. "Nobody does this. For me. I'm always the one who's, like, fine. I have to be fine. If I'm not winning then what's even the - " She caught it, too late, the truth sliding out under the babble, and clamped her mouth shut, mortified.
Leo went still.
And then he did the thing that finished her completely, which was to not laugh, and not pity her, and not rush to reassure her how amazing she was - but to just look at her, steady and kind, taking in what she'd let slip, and say, quietly:
"You know you don't only matter when you're winning, right?"
Aria stopped breathing.
"You're really impressive," Leo went on, simply, still holding the ice to her ankle, still unhurried, like he was telling her something obvious that someone had just neglected to mention. "The running, the records, all that - it's genuinely amazing, anyone can see it. But that's not - I mean, you'd still be worth taking care of if you never ran another race in your life. You sprained your ankle and you're sitting here being kind of funny about it and that's - you're a whole person, not a scoreboard. It's okay to let people look after you sometimes. Even when you're not winning. Especially then, probably."
It was, to Leo, a perfectly ordinary thing to say. The kind of gentle obvious reassurance you'd offer anyone who'd accidentally admitted they thought they were only loved for their results. He said it the way he handed back pens and caught falling teapots - automatically, kindly, without the faintest idea he was doing anything remarkable.
To Aria, it detonated like a flare in a dark room.
Because it was the exact thing. The precise, secret, never-spoken thing - the fear that lived at the bottom of every race, the terror that powered every sprint, the suspicion she'd carried so long and so deep she'd never once said it out loud to a living soul: that the love was conditional, that it was rented by the win, that the day she stopped being golden she'd find out how alone she really was. And this boy had looked at her swollen ankle and her bright brittle babbling for all of fifteen minutes and reached straight past all of it and said the one thing she had needed someone to say her entire life.
You don't only matter when you're winning.
Aria Blake, who did not cry, who did not falter, who filled silences and outran feelings and had never in her life been at a loss for something loud to say, felt her eyes go hot and her throat close and her whole face flood, for the first time anyone had ever witnessed, with a deep and helpless and utterly genuine blush - not the flush of exertion she knew so well, but something else entirely, something that started in her chest and climbed all the way up, the blush of a heart caught completely undefended.
"You can't just - " she started, and her voice cracked, and she had to stop. She covered her face with both hands. "Oh my god. Oh my god, why is my face doing that. Stop looking at me. You can't just say stuff like that, that's - who says that - put it back -"
Leo, alarmed, started to pull back. "Sorry - I didn't mean to upset you, I just -"
"You didn't upset me!" Aria said, muffled, through her hands, her ears scarlet. "That's the - that's the whole problem, you absolute - you didn't upset me at all, that's so much worse - " She dragged her hands down off her face and glared at him, flushed and flustered and grinning helplessly all at once, a complete disaster of an expression. "I don't even know you! You can't just kneel there fixing my ankle and being all - calm and nice and saying the perfect thing - that's not - that's against the rules. There's gotta be a rule against that."
"I don't think there's a rule against being nice," Leo said, baffled but smiling.
"There should be. For you specifically." Aria flopped back against the wall behind the cot, threw an arm over her burning face, and made a sound of pure overwhelmed exasperation. "Ugh. Okay. Okay. I'm fine. This is fine. I'm totally normal about this."
She was not, by any measure, normal about this, and Leo - who had spent his whole tenure here being told he was the strange one - watched the school's golden girl come apart over a kind word and a strapped ankle with a growing, gentle bewilderment, and concluded, wrongly but understandably, that she was simply rattled by the fall and the adrenaline crash and probably a bit embarrassed about going down in front of everyone. He resolved to be reassuring.
"It's okay," he said, packing the supplies away, missing the point by a comfortable mile. "Falls shake everyone up. You'll feel better once you've rested it. And honestly, nobody's going to think less of you - you took a tumble, it happens, you're still the fastest person on that field by a mile."
"That's not - " Aria lifted her arm, looked at him, and apparently decided the gap between what he thought was happening and what was actually happening was too vast to bridge right now. "Yeah," she said weakly. "The fall. Sure. That's it. The fall."
The nurse returned a few minutes later, full of apologies, inspected Leo's handiwork, and pronounced it - with some surprise - professional-grade, which set off a fresh round of who taught you that and aren't you full of surprises that Leo deflected with his usual modest discomfort. He stayed until Aria was properly settled, ice and elevation and instructions to stay off it, and then gathered his bag to go.
"Take it easy, yeah?" he said at the door. "Get better soon. And - " he smiled at her, that easy warm uncomplicated smile that she was going to be thinking about, she already knew, for an embarrassingly long time " - it's okay to not be winning for a few days. The track'll wait. Look after yourself."
And he left.
Aria sat on the cot in the quiet sunlit room, her ankle strapped with impossible care, her face slowly cooling, and pressed her hand flat against the bandage he'd wound so gently around her, as if she could hold the moment in place through her palm.
Nobody had ever told her it was okay not to win.
Nobody had ever told her she was a whole person and not a scoreboard.
Nobody had ever, in her whole loud golden lonely life, knelt down and taken care of her like she was worth taking care of for no reason at all - not for what she could do, just for being a person sitting there who'd gotten hurt.
"Oh, no," Aria Blake said softly, to the empty room, in almost the exact words a certain Student Council President had used two days before in another quiet office, neither girl having any idea she had company in her predicament. "Oh, no. I'm in so much trouble."
She looked at the strapped ankle. She thought about a calm voice asking does it hurt like the answer mattered. She thought, despite herself, despite every rule she'd ever run by, about how exactly she might arrange to need looking after again.
And Aria Blake, school idol, regional record holder, the fastest girl at Silverleaf Academy, smiled up at the ceiling of the nurse's office - dazed, blushing, and well and truly caught - and did not feel, for the first time in a very long time, like she had to run anywhere at all.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The nurse's office was empty.
There was a note taped to the inner door - CALLED TO THE GYM, BACK SHORTLY, a minor emergency two buildings over - and so Leo found himself easing Aria down onto the padded examination cot in a quiet, sunlit room with nobody in it but the two of them and a faint smell of antiseptic.
"Well, this is great," Aria announced, to the empty room. "The one time I actually need her. Typical." She was still talking too fast, still bright, still filling the silence, but Leo noticed she'd stopped putting weight on the ankle entirely now that no audience remained to perform fineness for. The grin had gotten a little less manufactured. "Guess I'll just sit here and slowly turn into a skeleton. Tragic. Star athlete, felled by ankle, found years later -"
"Or," Leo said, crouching to look at the injury properly, "I could just do it."
Aria blinked. "Do what?"
"Strap it. It's a basic sprain, by the look - it needs a compression wrap and some ice and to be kept up." He glanced around, spotted the supply cabinet, crossed to it and started, unhurried, gathering what he needed: a roll of elastic bandage, an instant cold pack, a folded towel. "I know how. I've patched up worse than a rolled ankle. If you'd rather wait for the nurse, that's fine too, but you'd be more comfortable strapped."
Aria stared at him as he came back with an armful of supplies and pulled a low stool up in front of the cot. "You - know how to do that. A first-aid thing. You."
"Me," Leo agreed.
"But you're -" She stopped. He watched her catch herself, watched some carefully-policed thing rise up and get swallowed, and what came out instead was a half-laugh. "I dunno. I've just never seen a guy do, like. A practical thing. Boys here don't really - they don't do stuff. People do stuff for them." She said it lightly but there was a real puzzlement under it, the same bafflement he kept triggering in everyone, the sense of a script being ignored. "You keep not doing the thing you're supposed to do."
"I get that a lot," Leo said wryly. "May I?" He gestured at the ankle, and waited - he always waited, never just took - until she nodded. "Tell me if anything hurts more than a dull ache. Don't tough it out. I need to know if something's actually wrong in there, and I can't tell if you're hiding it."
"I don't hide things," Aria said, automatically, reflexively, the way you'd swat a fly.
Leo looked up at her, mild, unbothered, and said nothing at all - just held her eyes for a beat with that calm noticing attention of his - and Aria, who had just been caught in a lie so total that even she could hear it, felt her face go warm and looked away first.
"...Okay, maybe a little," she muttered. "But it's a survival skill. You'd hide it too if your whole - " She stopped again. "Whatever. Just do the ankle."
So Leo did the ankle.
And it was, on the face of it, the least romantic activity imaginable - a clinical, careful, methodical strapping of a swollen joint - and yet the small sunlit room seemed to grow very quiet around it, and very close. Leo worked the way he did everything, with an unhurried gentle competence, his hands sure and careful, lifting her foot to rest on the folded towel across his knee, checking the swelling with a touch so light it barely registered, beginning to wind the bandage in smooth even turns. He was entirely focused on the task. He did not notice - he genuinely did not notice, being constitutionally incapable of imagining himself as the cause - that the girl above him had gone utterly, uncharacteristically silent.
Aria had stopped talking.
This was, for Aria, roughly as alarming as the fall had been. She talked. It was what she did, it was how she filled the world and kept it at the comfortable surface level where nothing could get in, a constant bright stream of noise that meant nobody ever got close enough to the quiet underneath. She did not do silence. Silence was where the dangerous things lived.
And yet she could not, for the life of her, find a single word, because all of her attention had narrowed down to the impossible fact of being taken care of - the warm weight of her foot resting on his knee, the absurd gentleness of his hands, the top of his bent head as he frowned in concentration over getting the wrap exactly right, getting it right for her, taking this much care over something as unglamorous as her swollen ankle. Nobody took care of her. People celebrated her. People wanted things from her - her speed, her wins, her reflected light. Nobody had ever just knelt down and quietly, competently, with no audience and nothing to gain, made sure she was alright.
Her heart was going like she'd just run the four hundred. Her face was on fire. And the great horrible novelty of it, the thing she had absolutely no defense against, was this: she was not performing. There was no crowd. He wasn't watching her be Aria Blake. It was just her, sitting still for once, being looked after, and being - she realized with a lurch - seen. Not the idol. Her.
"There," Leo said, tucking the end of the bandage neatly. "How's that? Too tight? Should be snug but you shouldn't lose feeling in your toes."
"It's -" Aria's voice came out strange. She cleared her throat. "It's good. It's really good. You're - that's really good."
"Good." He settled the cold pack against it, wrapped the towel around to hold it, and looked up at her with a small satisfied smile - and then paused, the smile flickering into something more attentive, because even Leo could not entirely fail to notice that the loudest girl in school had gone pink and quiet and was looking at him very strangely. "Hey - you okay? You've gone quiet. Is the pain worse? Do you feel faint? Sometimes after a fall the adrenaline drops and -"
"I'm fine," Aria said quickly, and then, because the word fine had been doing a lot of heavy lifting in her life and she'd just spent ten minutes being gently called on it, she amended, flustered: "I mean - I'm not, like, dying. I'm just. I dunno." She gestured vaguely, helplessly, at the strapped ankle, at him, at the whole strange quiet moment. "Nobody does this. For me. I'm always the one who's, like, fine. I have to be fine. If I'm not winning then what's even the - " She caught it, too late, the truth sliding out under the babble, and clamped her mouth shut, mortified.
Leo went still.
And then he did the thing that finished her completely, which was to not laugh, and not pity her, and not rush to reassure her how amazing she was - but to just look at her, steady and kind, taking in what she'd let slip, and say, quietly:
"You know you don't only matter when you're winning, right?"
Aria stopped breathing.
"You're really impressive," Leo went on, simply, still holding the ice to her ankle, still unhurried, like he was telling her something obvious that someone had just neglected to mention. "The running, the records, all that - it's genuinely amazing, anyone can see it. But that's not - I mean, you'd still be worth taking care of if you never ran another race in your life. You sprained your ankle and you're sitting here being kind of funny about it and that's - you're a whole person, not a scoreboard. It's okay to let people look after you sometimes. Even when you're not winning. Especially then, probably."
It was, to Leo, a perfectly ordinary thing to say. The kind of gentle obvious reassurance you'd offer anyone who'd accidentally admitted they thought they were only loved for their results. He said it the way he handed back pens and caught falling teapots - automatically, kindly, without the faintest idea he was doing anything remarkable.
To Aria, it detonated like a flare in a dark room.
Because it was the exact thing. The precise, secret, never-spoken thing - the fear that lived at the bottom of every race, the terror that powered every sprint, the suspicion she'd carried so long and so deep she'd never once said it out loud to a living soul: that the love was conditional, that it was rented by the win, that the day she stopped being golden she'd find out how alone she really was. And this boy had looked at her swollen ankle and her bright brittle babbling for all of fifteen minutes and reached straight past all of it and said the one thing she had needed someone to say her entire life.
You don't only matter when you're winning.
Aria Blake, who did not cry, who did not falter, who filled silences and outran feelings and had never in her life been at a loss for something loud to say, felt her eyes go hot and her throat close and her whole face flood, for the first time anyone had ever witnessed, with a deep and helpless and utterly genuine blush - not the flush of exertion she knew so well, but something else entirely, something that started in her chest and climbed all the way up, the blush of a heart caught completely undefended.
"You can't just - " she started, and her voice cracked, and she had to stop. She covered her face with both hands. "Oh my god. Oh my god, why is my face doing that. Stop looking at me. You can't just say stuff like that, that's - who says that - put it back -"
Leo, alarmed, started to pull back. "Sorry - I didn't mean to upset you, I just -"
"You didn't upset me!" Aria said, muffled, through her hands, her ears scarlet. "That's the - that's the whole problem, you absolute - you didn't upset me at all, that's so much worse - " She dragged her hands down off her face and glared at him, flushed and flustered and grinning helplessly all at once, a complete disaster of an expression. "I don't even know you! You can't just kneel there fixing my ankle and being all - calm and nice and saying the perfect thing - that's not - that's against the rules. There's gotta be a rule against that."
"I don't think there's a rule against being nice," Leo said, baffled but smiling.
"There should be. For you specifically." Aria flopped back against the wall behind the cot, threw an arm over her burning face, and made a sound of pure overwhelmed exasperation. "Ugh. Okay. Okay. I'm fine. This is fine. I'm totally normal about this."
She was not, by any measure, normal about this, and Leo - who had spent his whole tenure here being told he was the strange one - watched the school's golden girl come apart over a kind word and a strapped ankle with a growing, gentle bewilderment, and concluded, wrongly but understandably, that she was simply rattled by the fall and the adrenaline crash and probably a bit embarrassed about going down in front of everyone. He resolved to be reassuring.
"It's okay," he said, packing the supplies away, missing the point by a comfortable mile. "Falls shake everyone up. You'll feel better once you've rested it. And honestly, nobody's going to think less of you - you took a tumble, it happens, you're still the fastest person on that field by a mile."
"That's not - " Aria lifted her arm, looked at him, and apparently decided the gap between what he thought was happening and what was actually happening was too vast to bridge right now. "Yeah," she said weakly. "The fall. Sure. That's it. The fall."
The nurse returned a few minutes later, full of apologies, inspected Leo's handiwork, and pronounced it - with some surprise - professional-grade, which set off a fresh round of who taught you that and aren't you full of surprises that Leo deflected with his usual modest discomfort. He stayed until Aria was properly settled, ice and elevation and instructions to stay off it, and then gathered his bag to go.
"Take it easy, yeah?" he said at the door. "Get better soon. And - " he smiled at her, that easy warm uncomplicated smile that she was going to be thinking about, she already knew, for an embarrassingly long time " - it's okay to not be winning for a few days. The track'll wait. Look after yourself."
And he left.
Aria sat on the cot in the quiet sunlit room, her ankle strapped with impossible care, her face slowly cooling, and pressed her hand flat against the bandage he'd wound so gently around her, as if she could hold the moment in place through her palm.
Nobody had ever told her it was okay not to win.
Nobody had ever told her she was a whole person and not a scoreboard.
Nobody had ever, in her whole loud golden lonely life, knelt down and taken care of her like she was worth taking care of for no reason at all - not for what she could do, just for being a person sitting there who'd gotten hurt.
"Oh, no," Aria Blake said softly, to the empty room, in almost the exact words a certain Student Council President had used two days before in another quiet office, neither girl having any idea she had company in her predicament. "Oh, no. I'm in so much trouble."
She looked at the strapped ankle. She thought about a calm voice asking does it hurt like the answer mattered. She thought, despite herself, despite every rule she'd ever run by, about how exactly she might arrange to need looking after again.
And Aria Blake, school idol, regional record holder, the fastest girl at Silverleaf Academy, smiled up at the ceiling of the nurse's office - dazed, blushing, and well and truly caught - and did not feel, for the first time in a very long time, like she had to run anywhere at all.
You've reached the end of this chapter