#cautionverse

[yourskinnyjeansanyway]

It's dark when he wakes up and he doesn't want to go back to sleep because he doesn't want to relive that memory for a third time. Though he's probably sobbing too hard to sleep anyway and he can't curl into any smaller of a ball, and he can't be any closer to the wall. It's pressing into Leo's spine painfully and he knows if he looks later, there'll be a row of purple bruises down his back.

He forces himself to stop, taking a deep breath and holding it before he edges out from under his bed and stands up. Leo's clutching Dragon with one hand and wiping at his face with the other, not sure if he trusts himself to breathe without breaking down again, but he barely gets a few steps out of the doorway before he does.

Leo gets to Hyun's room, lurks at the door for a few seconds. The only noise is his shaky breathing before he tries to compose himself with little success and pushes the door open enough to creep in, and beelining towards Hyun's bed, though he pauses before he steps up onto it. Leo settles down on the mattress, his back against the wall and his legs up in front of him. Eventually, he moves so that he's laying down, mostly calm and still curled up in a ball with Dragon before he finally falls back asleep at the end of Hyun's bed.

[yourskinnyjeansanyway]

((proceed with caution)) - skivers - outtake

Leo didn’t want to go to PSHE. The last thing he wanted - or needed - to learn about was safe sex. He was a bit past that. Even though he sat next to Rose in that lesson, it wasn’t enough. So instead of going to the lesson, first thing on Monday morning, he filed out of registration after the other people did, and made a beeline for the school field, one of the only secluded places in the whole school.

He ended up sat on the grass behind the hedges that separated the playground from the field. Sometimes there were PE classes over here, though as far as he knew, there weren’t any right now. So he could just sit here, smoking.

It was fine until a girl came along, looked at him and said something that could constitute as a greeting, but Leo didn’t say anything in return. Mostly they just sat in silence, but every time Leo skipped out on PSHE the girl (who said her name was Elia) showed up too.

[yourskinnyjeansanyway]

((proceed with caution)) - sleep - outtake

Leo’s stood across the room, looking anxious and holding Dragon. Hyun is telling him that beds are good for sleeping, but Leo’s not entirely convinced. He’s tired of beds. Beds weren’t good. Though his bed didn’t have a headboard, and that was possibly one of the better things about it, he didn’t want to be on it. He liked to be under it. It was safer there, and that’s where all his stuff was anyway.

Hyun is still persuading, and Leo reluctantly, hesitantly steps across the room, moving onto the bed for the first time. He crawls across it, closer to Hyun, and curls up there, clutching Dragon. Hyun doesn’t move. He wants to wrap his arms around the younger boy, but something tells him that’s not a good idea. Instead Hyun half-curls around Leo in turn and follows him into unconsciousness.

[yourskinnyjeansanyway]

((proceed with caution)) - nightmares - outtake

There’s a crack as his shoulder finally dislocates, and his head swims with pain. He can’t do anything though; his arms are bound tightly to the headboard, but he’s being forced into positions that are increasingly more uncomfortable while the bed creaks under him. There’s a shift, both in noise and in movement from someone else, and the sharp sound of a match being struck. The smell of smoke fills the air - it reaches Leo, whose face is pushed into the mattress - and then there’s a hot stinging sensation on the side of his face that sears his skin.

Leo wakes up, suddenly, gasping. The noise is dangerously loud in the otherwise silent room, but he doesn’t notice that while everything blurs, and he curls into a tighter ball. He swears he can still feel the restraints around his arms, and the side of his face burning. Leo wipes his face against his shoulder, keeping his eyes shut tightly, though it doesn’t stop him from crying. As he adjusts his position barely, still trying to curl further into himself as if he could stop existing, he brushes against something soft.

The quiet sobs die down momentarily as he tilts his head back and while he can’t see what it is, he knows what it is. He reaches out for Dragon, curls around it, pressing his face into the toy. Despite the amount of time Leo spends carting Dragon around, it still smells like Hyun, and Leo eventually stops shaking and calms down. His breathing finally evens out, and he falls asleep again, holding Dragon.

[yourskinnyjeansanyway]

((proceed with caution)) - flowers - outtake

Leo was outside, in the garden, smoking mostly. Mostly meaning that for once, he'd ventured away from the wall and was currently sat in the middle of the grass, not doing much else. Hyun came outside, sitting down opposite him, but he was threading daisies together into a long chain. Leo watched him silently. It only took a few minutes before Hyun looked up and leaned forwards with slow movements - Leo was warily watching him now - and placed the crown of flowers on Leo's head where the green, white and yellow stood out brightly against his dark hair. Hyun sat back and surveyed his work with a head tilt before reaching for the camera next to him, the camera Leo hadn't noticed before.

"Can I take a picture?" Hyun asked. Leo was still for a long time before he nodded, looking away from the camera and down at the grass slightly to the side of Hyun before the picture was taken with a click.  

(Hyun has four versions of that picture: one he stuck to Leo's bedroom wall, one stuck to his own, one saved to his computer and one in his photo album)

[yourskinnyjeansanyway]

((proceed with caution)) - outtake

Clothes were weird to Leo. But the amount of time he ever actually wore clothes were short. Leo was popular. Thinking of it like that made his chest hurt. 

He liked clothes though. He liked sort of being able to hide, and to be able to cover up scars. It made him feel better, though he was unsure about the idea of shoes, and shoelaces that he couldn't tie. And he definitely drew the line at long sleeves, even though his arms were also ridiculously scarred, but there was just something about long sleeves that he hated.

So the world got to see the scars on his arms, but did it really matter? Leo only went outside for hospital appointments, pretty much. 

And he barely noticed them anymore anyway, unless he was looking for an unmarked spot to burn. 

[yourskinnyjeansanyway]

((proceed with caution))

Leo progressed rapidly with reading and writing. A month passed, and they'd taught him how to count beyond twenty nine, and thrown in bits about decimal numbers and fractions. He could read most words, although somewhat slowly and he stumbled over ones he didn't recognise, no matter how many times he was told to sound it out instead. Leo's writing was marginally better than his reading, though some of the more complex grammar and spelling rules were hard for him to make sense of, but it was learn to write, or have to talk more, and Leo opted to write instead. 

The next task was maths. Fortunately, Leo already understood the concept of time telling and therefore already knew a little bit of simple maths. Cartoons came in useful, and Leo was more than happy to spend time sat in front of the telly, even if he wasn't overly fond of the bright, cartoon numbers that leapt around the screen. 

Besides trying to educate him to a reasonable level (perhaps reasonable enough to send him to school) it was difficult to work around other issues. Leo wouldn't talk to people. He would talk to Grace and Hyun and Minho on occasions, though they had to ask specific yes/no questions to get most responses, unless Leo had a particular opinion. With anyone else though, Leo would respond to yes/no questions, but anything else they said would be responded to with a blank look. Maybe it was just everyone he lived with being used to his mannerisms - shrugging, the head tilts he picked up off of Hyun, the difference between the curious look and the 'keep it far away from me' look, and the signs of a panic attack - but other people just didn't know how to interact with Leo. He didn't trust them either. 

Leo stayed well away from people he didn't know. He didn't give them any opportunities to touch him, let alone be near him. He didn't exactly seek out contact from anyone else, people that he knew (and that was a short list of approximately three people) but he strayed closer to them sometimes. He would sit next to them, or not edge further away when they came near. Occasionally, and only ever with Hyun, Leo would lean into him and hide his face in Hyun's shoulder for a maximum for five seconds before putting usual Leo-distance between them. That was, theoretically, Leo's version of a hug. Yet with anyone else, if they got too close, he would flinch away.

Sometimes he would retreat under his bed for a couple of hours, a habit they couldn't break him of, but they never managed to get him to actually sleep in his bed, like he was supposed to. Leo didn't like beds. Might've been something to do with the amount of time he'd been forced to spend on one, endlessly getting cut, burnt and raped by various people. Under the bed was safer, anyway.

And still, sudden anything startled Leo. Hyun especially found that out, one day when he was explaining cameras to Leo, but put it down in favour of getting himself a drink. When he came back, Leo (and Dragon) were reading silently and slowly, but concentrating on the longer words. Hyun sat down, reaching for the camera because he wanted to take a picture, but when the flash went off, Leo gave that look, the wide-eyed, spooked look that was promptly followed by his retreat underneath his bed. 

And then Hyun had to resort to other tactics, of sitting on the other side of the room and reading to him, deliberately picking a book with longer words that Leo might not know. It worked, even if it took a while. He could hear Leo moving towards the edge of the bed and then eventually moving out from underneath it, still holding Dragon. He kept his distance from Hyun, but it was an ongoing effort to keep Leo out. If Leo resorted to hiding under his bed then it became harder and harder to get him out, and he refused to eat then. Leo still hardly ate. So unless it was night, they tried to keep Leo elsewhere. And sometimes it didn't work.

But it was May, and they only had until September to work through these issues, if they wanted to get him into a school. The longer they left it, the worse it would be for Leo. 

As May drew to a close, Grace remembered that it was Leo's birthday in around a month. And the question came unexpectedly for Leo.

"Leo, what do you want to do for your birthday?" She asked, hoping for a verbal answer.

Leo had been persuaded to poke at food downstairs because he'd eaten the tiny amount he could manage. The question caused him to freeze and the wide-eyed look came back before he left the room quickly, heading up the stairs to go back to the safety of the floor under his bed. Hyun followed him, catching the door before it slammed shut and...and Leo wasn't under the bed, but sat against it instead. Hyun was expecting him to be holding Dragon though.

Hyun took a seat in his usual place. "Why don't you like your birthday?" He asked neutrally.

Leo had flinched at the word birthday. "Hurts." He mumbled. Birthdays were horrible times for Leo, usually. It was a lot of Sven, too much Sven, and the inability to breathe through pain. Leo didn't like birthdays at all. 

And neither of them had anything to say after that.

[yourskinnyjeansanyway]

((proceed with caution))

Leo stayed under his bed, and no amount of persuading, talking or scuttlers could bring him out. Four days passed like that until Hyun went to go and watch tv instead, turning it up just a little bit too loudly on some overly colourful children's show. 

From his place under his bed, Leo could hear noises that were different to the usual house noises. Bouncy music and sound effects and voices he didn't know. He didn't know what Hyun was doing, but it was enough to make him slink out from under his bed and head downstairs to look, staying against one wall as he walked.

Leo peered into the room where the noise and Hyun were, and saw Hyun first, sat on the sofa, watching a large rectangle with moving drawings on. Leo blinked and tilted his head slightly to the side in a very Hyun-like way. He crept further into the room, arms wrapped around himself as he walked, sitting on the floor a little way away from where Hyun was, on the sofa. 

He watched the pointy faced, red haired character wander around the screen with a silent, green haired character, though the one with green hair was significantly more rectangular than the other one. They were...building things? And then a girl wearing a lot of pink showed up, but at least her face was normal shaped. 

Leo managed to follow the story semi-successfully, though he didn't know why the green animal walked around wearing a hat. Leo hadn't ever really seen an actual animal, he didn't think, but he also didn't think that they wore hats and walked on their back legs. 

It finished though, and real people came onto the rectangle. Leo watched them with disinterest for a few seconds before he stood up and went back to lay under his bed and draw. He doodled the characters he'd just seen, but he couldn't colour them because he didn't have anything like that. Instead, he fell asleep at some point, and weirdly, his dreams were full of green animals and pointy-faced people.

He was woken up by the door opening and Hyun coming in, Hyun who placed a bowl of food in the middle of the room as an indication that Leo needed to eat, and then sat down on the other side of the room. Leo glanced out from under the bed and then wriggled out, leaning against the side of the bed he never slept in and pulling the bowl of food closer to poke at it.

"Did you like the cartoon?" Hyun asked.

Leo nodded, not looking up. He was supposed to eat something that looked like it had a lot of stuff in. Leo didn't know what - he didn't even know what food he liked to eat - but he reluctantly ate four and a half mouthfuls of it before quitting.

Hyun was apparently satisfied with that (Leo was slowing beginning to eat more, and that was theoretically good enough) and decided to start reading then. Instead of relocating back to the safety of the underneath of his bed, Leo just pulled his knees to his chest and watched Hyun read. He didn't stay there for long though. A couple of pages in, Leo ventured closer, crouched in front of Hyun and the book. Leo watched the page, looking at the weird words on it before he found one that looked like whore, only with a bit missing. Leo pointed to it carefully and Hyun faltered and stopped to look at the word.

"Who." Hyun told him. Leo blinked, nodding mostly to himself before picking out another word on the page that started with the same two letters. 

"What."

This continued with all the words Leo could find on the page that began with wh. When he ran out, he went back to the side of his bed, and then moved back under it.

The next couple of days were showing Leo how to read, whether it was Leo actively taking a two minute interest in the words Hyun was reading or Hyun writing words down, saying them and showing them to Leo. Leo never repeated anything back, but Hyun wasn't expecting him to.

A week and a half later, Hyun wrote down the word dragon, and then showed it to Leo, saying it. Leo was still under his bed, watching Hyun from his place by the wall, but dragon made him remember.

"Like dragons." Leo told Hyun quietly. Leo used to draw dragons a lot, when he was still allowed to draw. He had a picture book that had dragons in it once, so he drew them.

And when Leo woke up the next morning, when Hyun came into his room before he left for school, he put things in the middle of the floor and exited. Leo waited until Hyun had gone from the house before he went to investigate. The bigger thing was blue and purple and squashy, and obviously a dragon. Leo smiled to himself a little bit, running a finger across the spikes on its back and tail, though he then turned his attention to the paper it'd been sat on top of. There were more shapes on there, the things that made up parts of words, and lots of drawings. Leo looked at the first one. There was a bad triangle on it with a circle next to it, but the circle had a flat edge. Underneath that was a calendar, the same kind that hung on one of Leo's empty walls, but with a word and a five on it. Leo was confused momentarily before he remembered the five. Five meant May. And there was a box drawn around the 'ay' part. 

It only took Leo a little while to figure out May without the M and what an M actually was, but then he moved onto the other letters. By the time Hyun came home, Leo could mostly match letter sounds to their written counterparts, and he was still hugging the dragon.