there’s something deeply troubling about his willingness to keep this thing with keira going the way it is. leo knows that--he isn’t stupid. self-destructive and with a penchant for creating miserable circumstances for himself, yes, but not stupid. far from it, even. for all the terrible choices he’s made, leo is uniquely aware of what those things means, and the few times he’s consented to see a therapist in the last couple years (at his mum’s and tori’s insistence, of course) they’ve all remarked on his sometimes-unnerving ability to perfectly describe his own situation, like an outsider looking in on his life. the point being that he knows what he’s doing, he knows it’s self-destructive and that it will end up hurting somewhere down the line, but maybe that’s why he does it. he likes to feel things, and feel them deeply, and sometimes pain can be as satisfyingly poignant as elation. also, keira’s worth it. painfully pretty, smart, funny, and with a smile that’s in itself a little like the drugs he can’t make himself stop taking. sitting with her now on the roof of one of the campus buildings (maybe a bad idea with police crawling around, but being fiercely intelligent has never made leo careful), passing a joint back and forth, he wonders a little cynically if he’d be half as infatuated if she did share his feelings. “look,” he points to a cop walking around down below, the size of a large ant from high up. “d’you think if i popped this rozzer over here with a couple quarters they’d leave me alone about the murders? i mean, think about it, right? nobody guilty’s going to be pelting change at the police.” ( @hlraeths )